Long Lost
by Kiana Caelum
Summary: Lisa Ochai had to start a war to leave her soulmate fifteen hundred years ago. Since then, he has hunted her - and now he is back, and will destroy anyone she loves to make sure he is the only one in her life. Anyone she loves - everyone she loves.
1. Prologue

**Long Lost - Prologue**

_Still a little bit of your song in my ear  
Still a little bit of your words I long to hear  
You step a little closer to me...  
So close that I can't see what's going on  
- Cannonball, Damien Rice_

_Britain circa 500AD – The Dark Ages_

How brutal love was.

The scent of blood blew across the killing ground. Thick and cloying, it made her stomach churn and swarmed through her like the flies that were already gathering on the still bodies.

Amidst the carnage, he waited for her, sword in hand. He seemed an angel of death, untouched by the harsh invasive sunlight, with a smile as dark as blood.

She'd known he would be here.

The aftermath of a battle was always ugly and this one was no exception. She moved among the dead, taking in the carelessly sprawled bodies, the empty, open faces. Lime-wood shields splintered under her feet, the grass slick and stained. Her back was straight and her stare unflinching as though she were a princess, gazing down into the flat eyes of those who could not look back.

Beside her, her escort clanked and held their iron-tipped spears ready - a golden convoy, too bright against her dark skin and hair. None of them had wanted to accompany her, but they'd had no choice.

So she came to him for the last time, the very last, treading through carnage. She hadn't thought she would feel so torn, so uncertain. Here was the parting of their ways – in the parted flesh of the dead, because they could find no peace in each other.

_All I did, I did for love and lack of love._

The wounded thrashed and twitched, words burbling between their lips - prayers, pleas, nonsense. Her attendees peeled away from her then, casting a cursory eye over their wounds and trickling water into their mouths. Those who screamed and sobbed were silenced with a quick knife.

She walked on, her feet daubed with blood and dew. The hem of her dress trailed through the mud, she a goddess to the smoky sight of the dying.

Here and there, she glimpsed a face she knew, pale and baffled within the sea of slaughter. She wanted to turn away, gods, how she yearned to, but...this was their fault. The two of them would not fight with something so cheap and endless as words, so they had danced with swords and spears, thrown armies into their battle and made death their advocate.

_All I did, I did for love and lack of love..._and for her love, for her lack of love, men were dying in a muddy field.

She stooped in the dirt to clutch their hands and speak stupid, meaningless words that were meant to be comforting. There was no one to comfort her, to speak the old lies and hide the horror.

This could not happen again. She could not stay, or there would be war and love and no difference between the two. It would never end - it could never end. Love conquers all, some fool of a poet had said once, not knowing how right he was.

They died with their fingers tangled in hers, listening to her lies.

She looked at the battlefield that love had made, at all these men conquered by love. They lay in clumps and chaos, as fragmented as the bloody pieces of her heart. She had done this.

_Omnia vincit amor. _It was true.

It was terrible.

oOo

At last, she reached him. He had no guard, nothing except a short Roman sword. It was the only hint that he'd ever had another life, away from Britain and her cold stony shores.

Somehow, he had become a man loved by his people, but no longer by her. His carefree smile was in place, hiding whatever lay behind those obscure, watchful eyes.

"Warlord," she said, stopping well short of him. She didn't want to be too close: she didn't dare to be snared by the seduction he wielded so effortlessly.

"Lady." The sarcasm on the word sliced her, but she could not show it. "Radiant as ever."

She would not bother with fake courtesies. "Are you pleased with your handiwork?"

Darkness in his eyes, and clenched behind his wicked smile. "You began this, Lisanor. I just finished it. Let's end this foolishness."

"The folly was all yours." It was over, truly over – this was not the man she had loved; this stranger was a warrior, a man of sharp words and casual passions. "Winning a battle will not win me."

His frown did nothing to lift the amusement from his eyes. "It was all for you, Lisanor, all of this – do you think I care whether Aelle thieves a few more fields? Let him have his sticks and stones...but he cannot have what is mine."

"I am yours no longer," she hissed, all the venom and anguish of the years exploding from her, needing to hurt him, to make him feel the betrayal that bled her dry even now. "I will never be yours again – even if the seas boil dry and every single star falls screaming from the sky, I will never be owned again."

"Was it so terrible to belong to me, as I belonged to you?" he snarled back, a wild light leaping into those shadowed eyes, the first hints of his wolfish nature creeping out. "Was I wrong to think you the better part of my soul? When you wept in the nights, did I mistake pain for joy? I have loved you, Lisanor, and I would love you again."

Lies and lies, superbly manufactured. Had it always come so easy to him? A dreadful sadness sank through her like lead weights because even knowing the depth of his deception, part of her wanted to believe him still, to follow his vision as so many others had.

"You lied to me, and you will do so again. Aelle has never made me weep," she answered, and that was not quite the truth. Aelle did not frighten her as this volatile warlord did – there was no wolf simmering within his pale skin, waiting to burst forth in clawing rage. There was no coldness in Aelle, no detachment or slow, merciless amusement.

It had not been Aelle who ripped her from her family and sold her into slavery. That was what she would not say: that was what she had never been supposed to find out. Aelle had not masqueraded as her saviour, her sacred lover; Aelle had no lies, only bluff truths and warm, rowdy temper.

She squeezed shut her eyes, trying to crush tears into dust.

All those lies – about soulmates, about himself, but worst of all, about love, sickly honeyed words that had never meant a thing. And even now, he played the game, played her like a harp, plucking her heartstrings and picking out her pain with such finesse it almost seemed lovely.

"Will his death make you weep?" he enquired, a deadly huskiness creeping into his voice, the first words of the wolf. "I doubt it, somehow. You don't love him, Lisanor – you can't throw me aside so easily. Your heart just isn't that fickle. But will you let him die for you?"

She had known this would be his ultimatum.

"I don't love him," she admitted. "But that will make it all the easier to leave him."

Triumph sparked in his eyes.

"And leaving you..." she continued, "...why, that will be even easier a second time."

The sword was flashing in his hand before she could move, but quick as he was, her guards were faster – one of them dragged her back as a ring of bristling spearheads ringed the warlord.

The rumbling snarl that came from him was nothing human, but he didn't move. Those spears might not kill him outright, but one of her guards was hefting an axe with a coldness to his eyes that met and matched the warlord's fury.

"I will find you," he swore, his voice echoing with hints of moonlit nights and howls, maybe with something of yearning too. "If it takes a thousand years I will find you."

"You won't, Alexandros," she said softly. "You won't."

"Does love mean nothing to you?" he shouted, shaking within the confines of his iron cage. "Do I mean nothing?"

She met his eyes for the last time, remembering when she thought she saw the end of her days in them. Unexpected pity and all-too-expected grief stung her.

"You mean everything," she answered, and her voice caught, heart nothing but an ache, nothing but pain. "But even if it takes a thousand years, I will forget you."

She turned on her heel, crossing her arms across her chest to conceal her trembling hands. The years ahead would be filled with travelling, with suspicion and the gnawing loss of him, with the dull ache of betrayal. She knew that already.

And knowing, she did all she did for love and lack of love. She would learn to forget. On she walked, not looking back, not daring.

"You can't outrun fate, Lisanora, and you won't outrun me!" he shouted, voice rough. "_I will find you."_

Fleeing that first love, fleeing that blood-soaked battlefield, she shivered.

_Stones taught me to fly  
Love taught me to lie  
Life taught me to die  
So it's not hard to fall  
When you float like a cannonball_

oOo_  
_

Thank you for reading! Comments, thought and criticisms would be much adored.


	2. Chapter One

Thank you: **Silvia**, **Shang Leopard, Yen**, **Takishia, yukatalamia, chocolatetree**, **Skysha-Tranqui, Chang Shikah**, **Bec** , **Anterrabae, laurakyna, Queen of Slayers **and last, but never least, the fabulous **Dactyl.**

I love hearing from you. I adore constructive criticism - it makes me a better writer, so please fire away! I would be extremely grateful if you could take a moment to tell me what you think; either way, I hope you enjoy reading.

Lyrics come from Chris Isaak's _Wicked Game_.

**Long Lost Part One**

_What a wicked game you play  
To make me feel this way  
What a wicked thing to do  
To make me dream of you  
- Wicked Game, Chris Isaak_

He had been a king last time he'd breathed winter air so bitter. His name still rang down the years like a funeral bell, but he was legend, half-forgotten, all idealised.

He had sent men into battle knowing they would not come back. Their lives had been payment, brief glittering coins that he had gambled with; he still could not say if he had won or he had lost. Either way, it had ended.

He'd do it all again if he had to. The price had been right.

The air was stifled, empty of anything except the weighty cold and his puffs of breath. He liked this bulky white world, buried, secret, waiting to be discovered.

In a landscape bleached of colour, mere chiaroscuro, he fit right in. Shadows seemed to pool about him, gathering in the supple, amused darkness of his eyes, waiting behind his teeth. Shadow clung to his hair too, a dark, mussed pelt that half-hid his sleepy stare – and half-revealed it as he moved, flash after flash of heat.

Only his smile was bright as snow, and far colder.

X - X - X - X - X

Lisa Ochai hummed a soft tune as she sketched, her attention only half on her work. The other half was on the topless shapeshifter who was drilling holes in the wall with exaggerated care. The smooth bronze shape of his body was disturbed only by the mass of scar tissue on his side, pale and gnarled as old roots. It didn't detract from his appeal in the slightest.

And Vaje Chusson knew it. He paused to wipe his forehead and give her a wink.

"Shameless," she said sternly from where she sat, a small table steadying the sketchpad.

"Always," he informed her. "Must be the company I keep."

A screech from the door announced her housemate's entrance: Chatoya Irkil moved carefully with the heavy tray, even though she could have floated it in on a wisp of magic if she'd chosen to. Her long black hair was drawn into a plait that dangled precariously over the brimming mugs, and might have accounted for the focus on her moss green eyes as milk and foam wobbled with every step

"There's nothing like a half-naked man in your living room," the witch proclaimed, flashing a merry smile as she set down the tray. "Thank goodness eye-candy's calorie-free, or between you and Jepar, I'd be the size of a killer whale."

Vaje gave her a long stare. "I'm not eye-candy. While I may be a fine specimen of manhood, I expect you to treat me like you treat any other work colleague."

Lisa had to fight to hide her frown. Most of the time she managed to forget that Vaje Chusson worked for one of the Furies, the three mercenary organisations of the Nightworld. He was atypical enough for it to be easy; unlike most of their handpicked elite, he'd come to them as an adult, and they couldn't quite erase his humanity, even if they'd done a good job on his morals.

But if she could forget that Vaje was a Fury, she could never forget that Chatoya ran one of them.

She was afraid for her friend; afraid that Chatoya would be lost under the deceits and cruelty of the Furies. She was afraid that she would be killed; or that the witch would survive only by becoming one of them, her heart as dead and cold and secret as the moon.

And worse, Lisa was terrified that she wouldn't know, that Chatoya would become as easy a liar as all the rest, her smile so dazzling that it would blind them to the uncaring, greedy thing that lay beneath it.

She had been fooled before. She would not let herself be fooled again, and she wouldn't let the Furies have Toya.

"In that case," Lisa remarked, "shouldn't she be hexing you into oblivion right about now?"

"Good point," he conceded. "On second thoughts, treat me like a valued friend who has an overwhelming need for caffeine."

The witch looked amused. "What a coincidence. I just happen to have what Cougar insists on calling a sexy mocha for you."

"A sexy mocha?" she said dubiously.

"It's covered with whipped cream. Apparently that qualifies as sexy."

Vaje nodded. "Yep. Can't fault Redfern's taste. Did you remember the sugar?" He sniffed the air. "I can smell lots of cream, but..."

"Vaje, if there was any more sugar in yours, the spoon wouldn't move. Why haven't all your teeth dropped out?" demanded Chatoya. She towered over him, a lanky six-feet to his five-something, and Lisa stifled a giggle because it looked exactly like a mother berating an overgrown child, not a teenage witch confronting a centuries-old shapeshifter.

"Good genetics?" he offered, slurping loudly. His eyes glittered over the mug, the same clear gold as olive oil and filled with mischief.

She and Chatoya swapped resigned glances. "It's so unfair," she muttered.

"Tell me about it," Chatoya grumbled, settling onto the sofa. "Why is it all the men we know can stuff their gaping maws full of food and never put on a pound?"

"Come on, ladies," Vaje cajoled. "'Tis the season to be jolly."

"Well, the weather outside _is_ frightful," Lisa conceded with a grin, gesturing to the bay windows fringed by piles of snow.

"Damn right." Chatoya gave a little shudder. "You might not feel the cold, but my nose nearly dropped off when I went to the shops."

She'd lost her ability to feel temperatures when she lost her humanity over a thousand years ago, but Lisa longed for the steel grip of ice, just as in summer, she longed to feel the heat hammering on her skin. Sometimes, she wondered if the numbness had spread to her heart, if she was atrophying year by year. Then she would prod at her old pain to remind herself she still felt.

This winter, though, she had no need. It was too close a reminder of another, too raw.

But she was in Ryars Valley, she told herself, staring down at her hot chocolate and trying to brush away her unease. This was a winter with whipped cream and tinsel and hunky shapeshifters. What more could anyone want?

"Too hot?"

Toya's voice was filled with more concern than the question warranted. She knew her too well.

"A little," she lied.

She switched the mug for her sketchpad. There was something soothing in watching the lines arch across the page, growing, merging, changing.

She carried on sketching as Toya and Vaje chatted, barely aware of the lines she left. Grey and shimmering, they began to form a picture from the scraps of a thought she didn't try to force.

Minutes passed, and the tension spilled out onto the paper, leaving her calm. She began to join the conversation, attention only half on her work now.

"...and despite what Cougar says, those were not the original words of 'We Three Kings'," Chatoya said firmly. "I'm not letting him near the mulled wine again."

Lisa grinned, having been treated to one of Cougar Redfern's impromptu Christmas carols before. "At least you didn't get 'O Come All Ye Faithful'."

All of them collectively winced.

"Who's that?" asked Chatoya, leaning over with a light in her eyes. "I thought you were doing Jepar's Christmas present."

She was. The shapeshifter had once said that there were never enough pictures of the people you lost, so she had decided to do a watercolour of his dead sister.

Lisa glanced down, and froze.

She knew that face well: so well that she had drawn it without thought or sight, so well that even a thousand years had not faded him from her mind. Last time they had met, it had been to the sound of steel shrieking on steel, two still figures in the midst of a battlefield they had created.

The face of her soulmate.

He had hunted her across continents and years. He had roused an army to pry the Saxons from Britain. He had ripped her from her land and her family. He had a thousand names, each married to a new tale as he flitted from place to place with ridiculous ease, but only one face, only this face.

The eye was drawn to his wide sardonic mouth, always smiling: he wore his smile like a mask, brilliant and blinding against the darkness of his dishevelled hair. Too few people ever looked past it to the eyes that were filled with lies except in those rare moments when he was undone, unravelling before her like a spider's web.

And if...if she had drawn him so carelessly, that could mean only one thing.

Alex was close. He had found her.

"It's no one," she answered quickly, flipping over the page. Her heart quickened, thunder in her blood. "A boy I saw in the street. He had an interesting face."

Vaje didn't look too pleased at that, but better his sullenness later than the truth now. "You must have been staring at him a while to sketch him that well."

Yes. She remembered times when she'd leaned over Alex and traced his face with her fingers, learning it as she had learned his language with its niggling irregularities.

"I just have a good memory for faces," she replied, careful.

"It used to drive me mad," put in Chatoya, riding to the rescue. "We'd go out shopping, and Lisa would spot someone 'interesting' and I'd be drinking coffee for the next hour while she sketched."

"Huh." Vaje didn't look convinced. "Well, I've done my manly duty for today. I promised that idiot Aspen that I'd help him wrap his presents, so..."

"Be nice," ordered Toya.

Privately, Lisa didn't see why anyone should be nice to Aspen Martin, who was pirouetting gracelessly on the line between sanity and madness. Her first meeting with him had been a bevy of racist comments with a few sneers about her species thrown in.

His next meeting had been with her fist.

"Be brief," she advised, and stood to give Vaje a kiss. "Dinner tonight?"

"If you promise I get all your attention."

"Of course." She knew it was a lie as she said it: her mind was on alert, waiting for the slightest trace of her soulmate's presence.

The door slammed with more force than was necessary. Before the echo had faded, she was on her feet, her pad clutched to her chest. The excuse sprang easily to her tongue, rolling out with a rueful smile.

"If I don't want a side of sulking man with my dinner, I think I'd better make tonight special. Which means three hours of nail-painting, moisturising and primping."

Chatoya laughed. "Pain is beauty. Need any help?"

They'd spent so much time giggling together over make-up and hair rollers, slathered in ridiculous products. She hadn't known how much she'd miss that – miss all of them. "Not yet. Don't worry, I'll shriek like a diva if I do."

"Good luck!"

She went up the stairs with exaggerated calm, but panic was an icy flood in her stomach. She knew what she had to do. She just hadn't thought it would be so soon.

She wasn't ready to leave.

But she had to. She couldn't risk him finding her. She couldn't risk what she might become.

That was the shameful truth. It wasn't just him she feared: it was herself.

X - X - X - X - X

She was close. His pace picked up, and his heart with it until it was a drumroll in his chest, all anticipation and thunder.

He had searched across the world, braving desolate mountains in hope of snatching a glimpse of her eyes, slogged across the desert, seeing the curve of her cheek in the sloping dunes. In the rustling of the Balkan woods, he had heard the echo of her whisper, but found nothing of the woman: on the baking coast of the Mediterranean, all the heady heat of her arms, but not a trace of her presence.

She had always been his dream – a bright, bold creature who had seen through the endless masks he wore. He had followed even the merest whisper of her to its end, scoured dank corners and shades of hell in the hope she might be there. For centuries, she had eluded him.

But he had found her.

He wanted her to know him, wanted to bare his soul to her and snatch it away; to make her his and only his, to cradle her broken heart in his hands and possess her once more even if it meant that death and war must follow.

Because he'd do it all again if he had to. And this time, he couldn't say what the end would be.

For love, and lack of love. For hope and lack of hope. For her...and for himself.

It was the predator's smile Alexandros wore, a perfect mask, hiding his intent in plain sight.

Lisanor was here. And so was he.

X - X - X - X - X

She moved as if in a trance; quick, methodical, ticking off the list in her mind. Panic nibbled away at her relentlessly, but Lisa had prepared herself as best she could. The bag was empty in her wardrobe, waiting to be filled with the things she couldn't leave behind.

A few clothes. Money, ID, pencils and paper, credit cards and toiletries. She didn't need anything else.

Except...

She hesitated, then grabbed the photo frame from her dresser, the one that had a crowded picture of them all. It would be smarter to leave them behind. She shouldn't cling to her past. Wasn't that what Alex himself had taught her?

Take nothing. Leave nothing. Mean nothing.

No. She was better than that.

Lisa rammed the silver frame into her bag face down so she wouldn't have to look at it. Her chest was hitching, but she forced down slow breaths and checked her room one last time.

It was crowded, full of silly things she had accumulated. Half-read books and scattered jewellery and posters and pictures. She didn't need any of it. She didn't need the yellow walls or the cushions she'd picked with Jepar or the plants that Toya had coaxed into swirling shapes.

She slung the rucksack over her shoulder, and turned to go.

Then she heard the unmistakable crash of Cougar Redfern throwing open the front door as if there was an enthralled audience waiting for him beyond it. Voices poured in – Jepar chattering, Alisha chiding him, rustling bags and feet, and above it all a filthy rendition of 'Jingle Bells'.

She froze. She could have slipped by Toya, but one of them was bound to notice her. There would be questions, interruptions, time clawed away by their affection and their curiosity and she would have to lie to them. Better for it to be sudden as a knife in the dark.

Lisa swung open the window. It wasn't too far, and the drainpipe was probably sturdy enough to hold her weight. It glittered with a thick coating of frost, but she had to risk it.

"No, she can't miss this!" she heard an indignant Cougar say. The vampire sounded even louder than usual. "My homemade Christmas cocktails come but once a year. Whereas Chusson-"

"Stop right there!" Chatoya yelped.

Lisa eased out of the window. Her grip felt distressingly fragile, but she shifted her weight onto the pipe, praying.

"Please," added Alisha, sounding weary. "I don't think I can take another single-entendre."

"How about a double malt, then?" Cougar said chirpily. "JJ, your girlfriend's glaring at me. Make her stop. Her eyes are all beady."

"Alisha's eyes are not beady," Jepar slurred, his voice far too loud. "They're beautiful shining pools of...of...shininess. Like this cocktail. Hey, Cougar, these are special. You can't even taste the vodka. Or the rum. Or the whisky. It's like fun in a glass." He paused, then said wistfully, "All we need is Abba."

"That's exactly what we don't need," Alisha said with some alarm.

"Damn right," agreed Cougar, who had the immune system of a vampire, and thus a truly gobsmacking ability to consume his own bodyweight in alcohol with very little consequence. "What we need is Lisa. She can't stay upstairs while we're all having fun. C'mon JJ, let's go find her."

"To the batmobile!" Jepar cried.

"Okay. You've had enough," announced Cougar as their footsteps clattered up the stairs. She edged nervously down the drainpipe. Her foot slipped – she clutched the metal desperately, scrabbling for a hold. "I forgot you can't hold your drink."

"I'm a shapeshifter! Of course I can hold my drink-"

She heard the click of the door opening.

"I'm not talking about milk," Cougar said. "God, it's freezing in here."

"The window's open..." Jepar said, and panicked, she began to climb down as quickly as she could. They couldn't catch her – she couldn't bear to tell them, she couldn't look them in the eyes and lie because she'd been stupid again, she'd done just what she'd sworn she wouldn't. She'd learned to love them despite it all.

Her fingers slipped – she grabbed for purchase and found none and suddenly she was falling, falling, a faint scream escaping her.

She smacked onto the ground with bone-jolting thud, the packed snow hard as stone.

"Lisa!" a voice said incredulously. "Are you okay?"

She opened her eyes onto the pitiless grey sky and, leaning out from her window, a gawping Cougar Redfern, mouth a dark oval of shock.

Beside him, Jepar looked a little glazed. His blond hair was dishevelled. "Are you making snow angels?"

"Not exactly," she moaned.

Cougar shimmied down the drainpipe with the insouciance of a career criminal. He lifted her up; she'd forgotten how gentle he could be when he wanted, brushing the snow out of her hair. Then his eyes settled on the rucksack, nestled in the snow.

She reached for it, but not quickly enough, and heard the buzz of the zip.

His voice was quiet, dangerous. That handsome face was hard, icier than the ground around them.

"Then what were you doing? Because it looks a hell of a lot like running away."

She stared at him, unable to lie.

"I think you'd better explain, babe."

Time was draining away like a fever. If she was going to go, it had to be now. She licked her lips, tasting that winter, ice and blood.

"My soulmate," she said. Shock reflected in his hazel eyes like the flash of a camera. "He's found me."

"Let me guess," Cougar said. "He wants to kill you."

"No," she said, and the fear crashed in on her. "That would be better. He wants to own me. Body, heart and soul."

Worse. Part of her wanted him to.

"Please," she said, voice rasping. "Let me go. I can't lose anyone else. If he has to kill every one of you to get me, he will."

"How do you know?"

A new voice answered – a light, amused voice that cut through her remaining composure like a machete.

"Because that's what I did last time."

She was turning, reeling, but for some reason her knees wouldn't hold her and the world was running at the edges like a watercolour while he filled the centre of it, smiling and so close – how had Alex got so close without her seeing?

His hands closed around her wrists, and she felt the connection spring between them. The world slowed, time oozing by in inevitable increments.

She fought it – she fought it with every inch of her being, muscles straining, fighting to be separate, one and whole and unbroken. But the soulmate link filled her body until her bones groaned with the effort of resisting it. Breath hurt, her skin stung, she was fire and ice and lightning, enduring because all of that was better than what she would become.

He held on, and she held back, the pain beating down on her. Stalemate.

She glared at him, teeth bared. She could do this. She-

Something like amusement flashed in his eyes. Alex leaned forward and brushed the softest, slightest kiss on her mouth.

The link split her heart like lightning. Lisa thought she screamed as the soulmate bond crashed onto her, but if the sound lingered in that world where she had been free, she could no longer hear it.

She tumbled into his mind, and could only think dazedly that it all felt the same. It was as if the years had not passed at all.

It still hurt like hell.

_I don't want to fall in love  
(This world is only going to break your heart)  
With you_

X - X - X - X - X

Thank you for reading! I would love to hear what you think.


	3. Chapter Two

Thank you to the lovely people who reviewed last time, and were the sunshine on this exceedingly rainy day. Thank you **Shang Leopard, nefarious nature, , Bec****, laurakyna, LifeSucksWithoutVamps, Clairavance, Chang Shikah**, **Queen of Slayers, BlowKissesNotBuildings, Izzy**, **beany **and last, but by no means least, the lovely **Mandy**.

I adore hearing your thoughts, and I'd very much appreciate it if you can spare the time to tell me what you think. Criticism is much loved; fire away!

Thank you to my wonderful beta-reader, MorbidDreamscape!

Lyrics from _Black-Eyed Boy _by Texas (Album: White On Blonde). Next part by June 18th. I hope you enjoy!

Ki

**Long Lost Part Two**

_You call me superstitious  
Tie me up with your deceit  
I could never be malicious__  
Though I seem so bittersweet  
- Black Eyed Boy, Texas  
_

The sky was clear and so bright she had to squint. Growing corn brushed her knees, itching. All around her, the fields stretched away in swathes of gold, broken by low stone walls that straggled across the hills. Far away, she could make out a cluster of buildings – low huts, a farmhouse, enough to tell her that Alex had never left Saxon Britain.

The last time she had dared to step into Alex's mind, it had been a British fortress, high and isolated and threaded by winter winds. The change startled her.

Maybe it was all just another image, as disposable as his smiles. Another trick.

"You've redecorated," she said flatly. "Very nice. Now please, let me go."

"Somehow I get the impression you aren't pleased to see me." The soft, slurring Cajun accent was new. So was his attire, which wouldn't have looked out of place on the fashionable parts of MTV, but seemed discordant against the wild landscape.

"Really? What made you think that? Was it the fact I was begging my friend to let me leave? Or was it the huge – and pay attention, this term is literal – _fuck-off_ war that I started to get away from you?"

Alex glanced away, his nonchalance apparently dented. She wasn't fooled. The words hadn't touched him in the slightest; he knew how to use vulnerability. It was part of his charm, a hint of softness under that dangerous veneer, a certain hesitancy in his manner that beguiled the unwary and led his enemies to underestimate him.

He used emotions as a sleight of hand. Distraction, misdirection, artifice. He was a magician of the highest order, the kind who didn't even need mirrors or smoke.

"That was a long time ago, Lisanor."

"Don't use that name. That was someone else."

"Really? She looked a lot like you," he answered, and slid off the wall in a smooth motion. "Lisa, then. That's the name you use now, isn't it?"

The implication burned her. "I don't just use it. It's my name. It's who I am."

"And who is that?" he said softly, strolling towards her as someone else might approach a frightened animal. Eyes lowered, almost meek, each movement slow and careful.

She stepped back, not caring how he took it. "Someone trying to be better than I was with you. Please, leave me alone, Alex."

"No."

The corn scratched her shins as she retreated, fists clenched at her sides. "I don't want you."

He lifted his eyes and the intensity there froze her - dark, heated, and so very knowing. "I don't believe you."

She could feel panic beginning to overtake her. All the years spent running had taught her control, but she knew just how powerful he was. If he wanted, he could pluck out her thoughts and examine them at his leisure. She was playing for time now, nothing else.

"I have another life," she said. "It doesn't involve you. It never will."

His laughter was soft, but there was a bitter edge to it that puzzled her. "While I have the same life, and it is empty without you."

"That was your choice."

"Yes," he acknowledged. "And I'm starting to think it was the wrong choice."

"It's too late for that," she said coldly.

Strange how she had thought the past was dead, gathering dust in the pages of journals and textbooks. And yet those old emotions – hurt, betrayal, fear – surfaced so easily that she trembled with them.

"No." His voice was a snarl. "I don't believe that either."

Green glimmered in his eyes, wolfish.

"You promised me, Lisanor," he whispered, and here, the words rumbled like thunder. All around them, the landscape was shifting, bleeding into stormy skies and ruined ground. The corn shrank beneath her feet until she stood on stones and weeds. "A fair chance for your heart, a fair chance for you. Who did you break that promise for?"

She tried hard to keep her mind empty, tried not to think of those she loved. There were so many of them, so many people he could hurt if he wanted.

Faces flashed before her in a dizzying parade – Cern and Vaje and Toya and Jepar and Cougar and Thom-

_No, no, no..._

His eyes were so cold. "I see," he said slowly, and his tone chilled her.

"Please, don't-"

Her pleas were cut off – back in the real world, she felt something tear his hands from her, and the link fractured like bone.

X - X - X - X - X

Disoriented, she opened her eyes onto Jepar, who was peering at her anxiously. The alcohol on his breath did more to restore her wits than the tentative way he was patting her face.

"Don't you dare go anywhere near her," she heard Cougar say, his voice glacial.

She nudged Jepar aside. Cougar and Alex faced each other across the snow, threat in every line of the vanpire's body. His eyes blazed gold, as inhuman as the fangs that he bared at her soulmate.

Alex was breathing hard, flexing his hands as if claws might sprout from them at any minute. A slow smile crept across his face, amused, a little contemptuous. "I really don't think you can stop me."

"Want to bet?" Cougar drawled.

She shivered as Alex let his power roll over the air – force that crackled like the air before a storm, heavy on her skin, more than a mere werewolf should possess. But then, it had been a long time since Alex had been just a werewolf.

"Yes," he said, and with that word, power pressed down on them. She heard Jepar gasp, heard the thud as he was slammed to the ground; Cougar was somehow upright, hunched against the sheer pressure bearing on him. "You aren't anywhere near enough, cher."

"But I am," a new voice said, and suddenly the weight was gone.

Lisa stared, awed, as Chatoya moved between them, treading delicately and lightly through the snow on her bare feet, but there was nothing gentle about the black fire that hugged her body. Her long black hair sheeted around her like a cloak, power billowing from her.

Alex tilted his head to one side, eyes narrowed. "How intriguing. A witch with dragon powers. You must tell me how you stole that spell from the Furies."

"I didn't have to," Chatoya said coldly. "I run Pursang."

They all knew the truth, but hearing it said so matter-of-factly gave Lisa chills.

A low sound rolled over the air, and it was a moment before she realised it was Alex laughing. "Is that supposed to scare me?"

"Usually it does," Jepar muttered, sounding bemused.

"How far have you been, little girl?" he said scornfully, gaze raking up Chatoya's body in a way that Lisa recognised. He had looked at the Saxons the same way, as if he could hardly believe their impudence in invading his country. "How much of Hades have you seen?"

Beside them, she saw Cougar stiffen. His eyes were fixed on Chatoya with something close to desperation.

"Nothing yet," Chatoya answered.

Hades. It was Nightworld legend, but she had been born in the times when it wasn't legend, when the Furies had sent their initiates into the underworld to drink of the rivers there and learn the secret of death. She'd thought it had been forgotten. But Chatoya hadn't been at all surprised by the question.

Alex raised his eyebrows, ostensibly polite. "Nothing? I've felt the breath of Hades himself – I've walked into the heart of the underworld and lived to tell the tale, and you think you can frighten me because you stole power from a sleeping lizard?"

The witch held her ground. "I think if you dare come near Lisa again, I'll kick your ass straight back into the underworld and you can give Hades a personal account of just what you did wrong."

"Feisty," Alex remarked. "But why don't you go and look up Alexandros in your archives, cherie, and then if you still think you've got a hope in hell of harming me, you come and try your magic on me."

Chatoya's eyes widened. The name meant something to her, that was for sure.

"I thought so," Alex said lightly, and he turned his attention to her. Lisa gazed back, suddenly unsure how safe she was, even in the midst of all her friends. "I'll see you soon."

Feral green swamped his eyes, but something unmistakably human remained in them – a calculating intelligence overlaying the beast. He threw back his head and howled.

The sound vibrated like a war cry in the air, and as its echoes faded, he turned and walked away, feet kicking up the snow. To the casual onlooker, he might just have been a teenage boy slouching along the street.

Lisa thought she could hear that howl long after nothing remained of him but silence.

X - X - X - X - X

The trees bent over the house like clenched fingers. It lay in a pool of shadow, broken only by thin shafts of grey light that seeped through the leaves. Snow littered the ground in small patches, and occasional flakes fluttered down from the canopy, but it was otherwise untouched by the winter.

Alex raised a hand to knock only to see the door swing open.

The boy standing in the doorway was startling. His face was handsome, teetering on the edge of beauty, all sharp edges that were only balanced by a full mouth that curled with contempt. His hair was bright blue, and a match for his eyes, which regarded Alex with a detachment that suggested he was being valued, much as an item at auction.

Alex strongly resisted the urge to slap the little bastard, who had been useful so far, and put on his most irritating smile.

"Surprise."

Blue Malefici, the vampire who ran Nightfire, the oldest of the Furies, raised his eyebrows. "Not exactly. Everyone within a hundred miles probably felt that show of power. I thought you were famous for your subtlety."

"Among other things," Alex said with a little purr. He let his eyes rove over the vampire, a slow, thorough examination. Very good-looking, but so emotionally repressed that he had to pity anyone foolish enough to get involved with him.

He thought he detected a flash of annoyance in the boy's face. "Did you get what you wanted?"

"Not even close," he said with a lazy smile. Her rejection rankled, more than he had thought it would. "But this is only the start. Do you have the records I asked for?"

"Do you have the knowledge I asked for?" Blue countered.

Alex tapped his temple. "Of course."

It was, perhaps, not wise to tell Hades' secrets to this one. Five rivers laced the underworld. Once the Furies had gone to each to drink and learn, if they survived. Now most of them went only to the first, a handful to the second, and only three people out of all the Furies had sampled the third. Blue Malefici was one of them.

Alex stood so far above them in power that he would have seemed a god if he was foolish enough to reveal the full range of his abilities. He wasn't sure that giving Blue the same advantage was a wise idea.

But he needed the Furies to win Lisanor.

Nothing else mattered.

X - X - X - X - X

"Do you want to explain what the hell just happened?" Cougar demanded, his expression close to hostile.

She looked around at them all, the words stuck in her throat. Alisha had ushered them all inside, efficient, carefully not commenting on what had just happened. Jepar was huddled by the radiator. Cougar was rubbing at his neck and shoulders as if they ached, while Chatoya was busy drying her feet with a towel, grimacing. She might not have felt the cold while she was saturated with magic, but once it had vanished, she started hopping from foot to foot.

His outburst drew all their eyes to her. She didn't know what to say. It was obvious that she had lied to them. They'd caught her trying to run away. They'd seen Alex, and they'd heard what he said.

"What is he?" Jepar asked finally. "That guy had more mojo than a voodoo convention."

"That..." Once she had started, it became easier. "That was Alex. My soulmate."

"See, this is the bit I'm confused about," Cougar said coldly. "The bit where you forget to mention that you have a soulmate and he's a maniac. Because it's not as if we're short on either round here. You'd think you might have found time to mention it between psychos."

She swallowed. His hostility made it easier. "I didn't want you to know."

"Why not?"

"Maybe because he used to run Nightfire," Chatoya suggested quietly. She was pale, hands clasped so tight it must have hurt. "I can understand why you'd be ashamed of that."

"That was part of it." She found herself staring at the floor, not wanting to meet their eyes. But she owed them the truth. They had put themselves on the line for her. "But not all of it. It was a long time ago. A very long time ago."

"So you're not thirty," Jepar said tentatively.

"No." She met his summer-green eyes, shorn of all humour. "I don't know exactly how old I am. But I was born around fifteen hundred years ago."

The silence was absolute. None of them even moved.

Then Cougar said, "Say that number again."

"I'm fifteen hundred years old, give or take," she said quietly. "I was born in Africa, but I don't know where. When I was young, the Romans conquered us, and I was taken into slavery. Alex was my owner. And then...one day I found out he was my soulmate."

"Whoa..." Jepar breathed.

Of them all, only Alisha didn't look shocked. There might even have been understanding in her cool blue eyes. After all, she had lived eight hundred years as an Old Soul, passing from life to life and death to death.

"He had me changed into a vampire," Lisa continued, trying hard to forget that night, her fear and the feel of her chest hitching as she tried to breathe only to find that the air was no longer there. "We travelled everywhere – the Roman Empire was trying to hold onto its colonies, and he was one of its governors. At last we were sent to Britain to try and stop the rebellion there. He didn't care – the Furies were bringing down the Empire. Everything he did was for show. There was...there was a woman. She told me about Alex – what he was. Things...things he had done. I left him."

Sad how so much could be distilled into brief words; her life reduced down to a few core, terrible truths.

"But he chased me. I went to his enemies and begged them for shelter." A disbelieving little laugh choked out of her. "And do you know, do you know what he did then?"

"Lise..." Chatoya said gently, reaching out. Her face was full of concern, horror in her eyes.

She had to get through this. "He raised an army to get me back. He was there for years and let the Saxons ravage the damn country, but he united fifteen warring tribes because he couldn't bear the fact I'd left him. We fought. And he won – the Saxons surrendered, but I left him all the same. And now – now he's a legend. They make these stupid films about him, they write about him as if he was some kind of hero, as if he did it to save someone. He didn't. He went to war because he was a jealous man, that was all."

"It wasn't your fault," objected Jepar.

"It was," she said tiredly. "I could have stopped it. I could have said yes, and gone back to him, and pretended for a while. But I didn't. I let men die. I saw them ripped to pieces and I still didn't stop it."

I didn't want to. I hated him. He lied to me, and I just wanted him to suffer – I wanted everyone to suffer because at least then I wouldn't be alone.

She couldn't bring herself to say those things to her friends. Nor could she tell them the whole truth – the poison, the massacres, the deeds that she had been complicit in.

By far the worst, the battlefield was stark in her mind, dark with blood, disfigured by the bodies sprawled upon it.

"I ran from him for hundreds of years. I always knew he was following me, and sometimes he came so close, but he only caught me once." That time was blurred by fever and exhaustion. "He let me go. I still don't know why. But he made me promise that when he f-found me again, I'd give him a fair chance. And now he has. I don't know what to do."

"So you went for climbing down the drainpipe," Cougar said, some of the anger fading from him. The smile he offered her was grim, but filled her with relief nonetheless. "Not too smart, babe."

She scrubbed at her face. "I wasn't thinking straight."

"No wonder. You really started a war to get away from him?"

"I really did," she said glumly.

"Then that's a guy who really can't take 'no', 'hell no' or 'screaming Saxon army no' for an answer," the lamia declared. "I vote we skip the niceties and go straight for annihilating him with Toya's scary dragon powers."

"Seconded," Alisha said, raising a finger.

"I'm not sure that'll work," Chatoya muttered. "If he's been as far into Hades as he says...I don't even know what kind of powers that would give you."

"Then find someone who does," suggested Cougar shortly. "One of your merry lunatics will know."

"Actually..." The witch gave a little nod. "You're right. Vaje used to work on the archives."

"No." The word flew from her. "I don't want him to know."

Chatoya looked taken aback. "Why not?"

Because what else is in those archives? What do they know about me, about what I did? For love, I told myself, and it was all lies.

She searched for an excuse that might be acceptable, but nothing sprang to mind. There was no reason for Vaje not to know. After all, he was about the best protection she could get aside from Chatoya.

"Because I lied to him too," she said finally.

Jepar gave her a sweet grin. "I'm pretty sure he's crazy enough about you to get over it."

That startled her. She doubted Vaje was crazy about her; fond of her, attracted to her, a close friend, a lover – yes. But that was as far as it went. She didn't kid herself about that. Nor did she mind.

"I guess," she said finally.

"I have a question," Alisha said. "You said Alex was a legend. He's obviously not Alexander the Great-"

"Alexander the Great Pain in the Ass, maybe," Lisa muttered.

"-then who is he?"

She supposed there was no harm in them knowing. The truth of the whole affair was long obscured by romantic interpretations of the legend. "He didn't use that name in Britain. His formal name was Ambrosius Aurelianus in the Empire, but he was so fierce in battle that they called him 'the bear'. Artos."

"Still not ringing any bells," Cougar said helpfully.

"Better known as King Arthur."

_Your black-eyed soul  
You should know that there's nowhere else to go  
__My black eyed boy,  
You will find your own space and time_

X - X - X - X - X

Thank you for reading! I'd love to hear your thoughts.


	4. Chapter Three

Evening all. A little late this time, for which I apologise humbly. 'Twas my own fault, and I shall be sure the next part is on time. Huge thanks to the most awesome, lovely and angelic people who reviewed last time around! Thank you:

**Chocolatetree**, **Clairavance, Alex**, **Shang Leopard, Izzy**, **BlowKissesNotBuildings, Jezebel Montgomery, Elentiriel, Chang Shikah**, **wasurera**, **Anterrabae, nefarious nature, Bec**, **Mandy**, **terrorofthehighway** and last, but by no means least, the superb **Shelli**

I adore hearing what you think. Criticism is very welcome, and any thoughts, opinions, queries are enjoyed!

Thank you to my fantastic beta-reader, MordiDreamscape, who makes this all much better...  
Ki

**Long Lost Part Three**

_I used to rule the world  
Seas would rise when I gave the word  
Now in the morning I sweep alone  
__Sweep the streets I used to own  
- Viva la Vida, Coldplay_

"Hang on," Cougar said, sounding stunned. "He's the legendary King Arthur?"

"Yes."

"Jesus." The vampire was silent, taking it in, then he said, "What a let-down."

Lisa gave him a quiet smile. "You have no idea."

"Is it all true?" Jepar piped up, green eyes bright like grass. There was eagerness in his face, and she remembered that he'd spent his summers in Britain, and had probably grown up with the legends. "Lancelot and Guinevere and Merlin and-"

She felt a lump rise in her throat at those old names. "Some of it. Lancelot was just a poet's invention. But Guinevere was real, and so was Merlin."

And how I miss them. Some are dead, and some are not, and some are probably somewhere in between. Alex bound us all with his endless games, whether we loved him or hated him.

"Are you in the legends?" Alisha said suddenly, her gaze shrewd. There wasn't any of Jepar's excitement in her face - more the curiosity of a historian.

"Yes," she said reluctantly.

"Dare we ask?" Chatoya said softly, a smile crooking her mouth.

"Look up Lisanor," she said, unwilling to reveal more than that. "I'm there."

"I still can't believe you saw it all," Cougar remarked, his hazel eyes bemused. "I mean, it's you, Lise, but it's not. There's this whole other person and we never even knew."

She opened her mouth to apologise, but then stopped. It was pointless. She was sorry for all she had kept buried, entombed in her heart until she could almost convince herself that those memories were desiccated, dead things - but if Alex hadn't found her, she would never have said a word.

"It's still me," she offered instead, meeting his eyes. "So I had a life before I met you all. It doesn't change the one I've had with you."

"Yeah, it does," he said flatly. Lisa was startled to see disappointment in the vampire's expression. His explosive anger, she could have brushed off, but that jolted her. "You lied. And you lied so well that none of us questioned a damn thing you said."

"I had to-"

"No, you didn't. You think we would have cared?"

Part of her cringed away. They might not have cared about some of it, but other parts – if they had known her then, Lisa doubted they would have liked her much. They would have found her besotted, loyal only to Alex, a thoughtless girl blinded by promises of love, who had been sly and ruthless in her pursuit of it.

"I...I couldn't trust you at first," she said simply. "And when I did, it was too late. I just wanted to forget about it all."

"To forget about him, you mean," Alisha corrected, her voice pleasant but clinical.

For a moment, Lisa fought back tears. All she had lost struck her hard: because of him, the man she'd loved beyond reason. "Yes," she said, through a lump in her throat. "But I guess Alex didn't forget about me."

"Can't blame him," Jepar said with an attempt at cheer. "It's almost flattering, if you think about it."

Chatoya gave him an incredulous look. "No, it's creepy. He's been stalking her for hundreds of years. That's not love. That's obsession."

"That's thousands of dollars of business for a good shrink," he argued. At the collective stares of everyone, the shapeshifter gave a shrug and his usual merry smile. "Just trying to see the bright side."

"And on the dark side," Cougar said, the tension obvious in every line of his body, "how likely is this to end in misery, pain, death or any combination of the above?"

There, at least, they deserved the truth in totality. "Very, unless I give him what he wants."

"Let me guess, incredible nookie?"

She had to smile. "If only it was that easy."

"You can be," he quipped. His humour was always at its best when things were falling to pieces, but it was merely a shield for everything he wouldn't say aloud. The tightness about his eyes contradicted his rakish smile. "You meant what you said outside? He wants to own you?"

"Yes." And he could so easily. "Old habits die hard."

"Oh, don't worry, babe," Cougar purred, his voice all silk and shadows. "We'll help you kick him."

She saw Merlin predicting the same thing, just as young and vibrant and arrogant. The two of them were briefly interchangeable, time a melting pot of now and then, and she had a terrible sense of foreboding.

War and magic had made no difference before. So many had been cut down, the harvest long and bloody, the reaper the only victor. In those fraught times, she had told herself such deeds need never be done again once that battle was over – but she had been wrong, she had been naïve, and she was afraid that the price would be just as high this time.

But when she blinked, it was only Cougar smiling his fierce, fake smile. Merlin lay where she had left him, a skeleton smeared with dirt.

She would find a way to stop this. Everything was different now; she was different. She was no longer alone and powerless – she was no longer crippled by her fear, no longer willing to be duped by soft lies.

"I can do it myself," she said firmly, head held high.

Then she looked around, and it struck her hard how much she valued them, how easily she could lose them. They were not pawns in a game, but they would become so if she tried to keep them free of it all.

"But I wouldn't mind some help," she added.

X - X - X - X - X

Under the gathering darkness, Alex went out into the woods, chasing the wolf song he had heard earlier. Adrenaline still heaved in his veins – he wouldn't be sleeping tonight.

Sleep had always seemed just another sort of death to him, and so it never surprised him that his dreams were thick with it, a catalogue of war and plague, famine and murder. Although he had been raised in a culture that valued dreams as omens, he had found no answers in them, only himself.

No surprise then that he often dreamed of Hades, so he was glad of the escape tonight.

But whether it was just being so close to the Furies again, or whether it was Lisa and all that had brought him here, it crept unbidden into his waking thoughts.

He had been in the Furies for nearly a decade by the time he went there for the fifth time. This was the final test, and then he would stand equal among them, marked by each of the five rivers. Four, he knew: the Acheron, which had taught him the depths of despair. The Phlegethon, where he had burned and been burned. The Styx, in which he had seen the brutality of his hatred, and conquered it. The frozen Cocytus that he had broken with his bare hands to sip the icy waters beneath, tasting with it his fears.

Only the Lethe remained.

It was a whirlpool at the very heart of Hades, and the Mnemosyne too flowed into it, long ago swallowed by the voracious pull of the current; the river of memory and forgetting, it was the most powerful of the five, and the most deadly. It cut to the very core of what the Furies were and why they had endured so long.

One draught. One chance.

If he failed, he would not leave.

The way was narrow and treacherous, a slippery path through a gorge of ice. Strange lights were entombed beneath the surface, throwing sinuous blue shadows across the passageway. Nor was that all they illuminated.

When he saw the first dark shape in the ice, it piqued his curiosity. He spent long seconds squinting at it before realisation struck him.

It was a person.

As he went on, he saw others, some pressed so close to the surface that he could have smashed into it and dragged them free. But they were long dead, skin pale and luminescent as calla lilies, lips the dark, smudged blue of inkstains. One was a beautiful girl suspended just above the ground, her dark hair fanned about her and her hands outstretched as if waiting for a blessing. Perhaps it was the flickering lights that gave her face eerie animation, but Alex could have sworn he saw her blink.

He didn't look at them after that.

The cold ate through his skin, until he felt as slow and heavy as mercury. Alex began to think he would never reach the end – he would collapse to his knees, then to his hands, and the ice would creep over him too.

But he went on, looking no further than his next step. And when his foot found purchase on stone, Alex knew he would live at least a little longer.

Shaking with cold, he staggered out into a cavern that stretched away as far as he could see. Shadows lay around it like fuzz, the only light pale and greenish, emitted by the phosphorescent lichen that clung to the stalagmites. It reflected from the swirling water ahead, refracting onto the ceiling in tiny shards.

He went down to the whirlpool tentatively. The air was noisy with the crash and hiss of the water. It was eerie and magnificent and everything he had imagined.

The path was worn and ran past the whirlpool, down to a small bank. Here the river was fast but less treacherous, yet to become part of the vortex. He knelt down there, or rather, toppled down, his knees only too ready to give way.

He reached out to the water-

"So you made it."

The voice was right beside his ear, and he started so hard he would have fallen in if firm hands hadn't yanked him back to the dubious safety of the bank.

Later, he realised she must have been concealed in shadow, waiting. Then he could only stare amazed into her familiar face, her grey eyes bright, clever and just a little amused. The great tumble of black hair was untamed as ever, and where he was gasping and exhausted, she seemed fresh as a violet.

"Neve?"

"None other. Welcome to the end of hell."

He looked out over the river. Beyond it was a great chasm, and in its centre a vast, shadowed pillar. Hades' throne, the Furies named it, half in jest.

Death sits there, we kneel here, and only darkness divides us.

"Doesn't look like the end to me," he said, gesturing.

"It's as far as we go." Her smile was slow and confident. "Final test, Alex."

"And you're it?"

She stood back, tall and narrow as Hades' throne. Death sat with her too – she had come to the Lethe some years ago. It had left her with an air of mystery, a certain light in those secretive eyes that named her unconquerable, indomitable. It drew men like moths.

"No. The river is the test, same as always. I just came to offer you a little help, if you want it."

He frowned. "What kind of help?"

"That would be telling."

"Yes. It would. Which is why I'm asking. After asking comes telling. Basic conversation, Neve."

She laughed. It was as loud and rowdy as her voice was soft, and never ceased to startle him. "Yes or no, Alex? Do you want my help?"

Her offer was baffling. Everyone came to Hades alone.

_You have only yourself in hell_, the Furies were fond of saying. _In Hades, you will find nothing more than yourself, nothing less than the truth._

A thought struck him. "Does everyone get this offer?"

Her smile had a hint of pride to it. "Yes."

So it was a test.

No one spoke about the Lethe. He had known what to expect on every other visit. This time, he had come armed only with determination.

He thought of all that had come before: despair, pain, hate, fear. He had battled them alone, and won. But the last river was different. The pool of forgetting and memory. What would he forget?

The way out, perhaps. Who he was.

They had sent someone he would trust. And this would be either proof of that trust or betrayal of it.

"Decide," she said. "And drink."

He met her eyes, steady, familiar.

_You have only yourself in hell_.

Not anymore.

"Help me," he said, and leaned forward to drink.

X - X - X - X - X

He had lived. The choice had been right, and he had needed Neve that day. In the shadow of Hades' throne, he had drunk the Lethe and lived and found power at his fingertips.

But it had not been his last visit to Hades. He had gone back, just once more, driven by hubris and the need to prove himself more fearless, better than all who had gone before him. He had gone beyond the Lethe, and as the Furies had promised, found nothing less than the truth.

It had brought him here, to this moment. He had been a beggar and a king, a victor and a victim, and somewhere between all of those things, a man in love.

But right now, he was a wolf and he was lonely.

They registered on his senses as dim glows, little more than fireflies in the immensity of the night. As he stepped into the clearing, they saw him, and froze.

He looked around at them and realised that this was not a wolf pack. This was a cluster of vagrants huddling together for the illusion of safety. They had built themselves a home of sorts here; a campfire crackled in the middle, surrounded by old picnic benches and rugs. A couple of tents were pitched in he corner, but he'd bet most of them slept in their fur.

A woman stood, her face wary. The firelight turned her red hair into an echo of itself and made strange lights shift in her eyes. Her voice was husky and hostile. "I hope you have a good reason for intruding."

He swept her a mocking bow. From her stance to her words, everything about her screamed alpha. "Is the need for the company of my own kind enough?"

And then he dropped the shields he kept over his power, letting it prowl about them like another wolf, this one vast and intangible and hungry. Gasps, a cry, a girl wrapping her arms about herself and rocking as if that could help her.

The woman was the only one who didn't react. "If it's company you want, it's bad manners to terrorise them."

He liked her nerve. "You're quite right, cherie." He let his voice caress the last word, injecting a little heat without thinking. "My apologies."

Alex pulled his power back under his skin and politely resurrected his shields. Then he waited while she watched him, head tilted to one side.

"I've never met a wolf with that much power," she said mildly. "Who are you?"

"My name is Alex Morelli," he offered, plucking a surname from his mind with ease. "I'm a traveller."

"And how long have you been travelling?"

Interesting. He couldn't scent a whiff of power from her either. He could have knocked down her shields and looked for himself, of course, but that would have been rude. And unnecessary. She was no spring chicken, that was for sure, but she was no threat to him.

"Long enough."

Her half-smile said she didn't appreciate the evasion but knew better than to enquire further. "And why did you decide to stop here?"

"I heard a song on the night, and I remembered how much I missed it." And that was truth. He had been an incessant hunter for centuries. Always moving, never pausing, never running for the sake of it. His life had purpose, but nothing of friends, nothing of company. "I thought I might come and listen and rest a while."

"He honest?"

The woman threw the question out, her eyes cutting to a boy perched on one of the benches.

With a shock, Alex recognised him from Lisanor's mind, remembered the fury burning his chest as he snarled, _W__ho did you break that promise for?_

And she had thought of this boy, whoever he was. This gaunt, flimsy creature who registered so palely on Alex's senses that he was barely a speck of dust caught in light. Alex studied him, bemused, ire turning over in his stomach. How did he know Lisa?

"He's honest," the boy said. His eyes were bleak, little interest in them as he looked at Alex. His hair was wavy, his face grimy.

"Then you can stay," the woman declared. She came forward and offered Alex her hand. "Donna Ares. I look after this rabble."

The warning was clear. It meant nothing. He could have killed them all here and now if he'd wanted, and the thorny jealousy in his heart urged him to. But Alex held back. "Then I'm honoured to be one of them, if only for a while."

If only so I can find out who that boy is, and why he dares creep into my Lisa's heart like a cancer.

X - X - X - X - X

With some measure of privacy, Lisa got ready for her date. It felt surreal, going through the motions when she knew that there would be nothing of romance left, only confessions hanging on the air while their food went cold.

She touched her face with make-up, gold eyeshadow and dark lipstick, shrugged into an orange top and jeans, and stared in the mirror. It all looked like a mask, hiding the truth – hiding Lisanor, who had gone into battle, who had intrigued with kings and slaves alike, who had dabbled in magic of the foulest, darkest sort.

A light knock made her turn from the mirror. Chatoya came in, bearing tea and a hopeful expression. She shut the door after her and went to sit on the bed.

"I just came to see if you're okay," she said.

"Not really," Lisa said glumly. "My soulmate is a world-class stalker, my friends just found out I lied to them, and now I have to tell my boyfriend that I need him to research the soulmate he didn't know I had so I can stop him trying to kill everyone around me. As far as bad days go, this even tops the day Jepar discovered disco."

Chatoya covered her smile, but Lisa heard her snicker. "Hush. It was a revelation for him."

"It was more Book of Revelations for the rest of us." Lisa met her eyes. "I'm sorry, Toya. I wish I'd found a way to tell you."

"You could have," Chatoya said solemnly. "Honestly, don't you think I would have understood? You're not the only one who has a Fury for their fated other, you know."

"I...I didn't think you'd understand," Lisa said quietly. "He's not like Blue."

"Who is?" Chatoya said wryly, "If he was a bigger ass, Jennifer Lopez would be out of a job. But...but..." She sighed, and seemed infinitely older, less the girl Lisa had met and more a young woman. "I know what it means to love someone like him. It's crazy and it's an endless fight, and half the time you hate them as much as you love them."

Lisa couldn't stop her brittle laughter. "I'm not being rude, Toya, but I don't know if you can understand."

Chatoya raised her eyebrows. "Why not?"

"You love him. I know that. I don't like it, but I know it. And I can just about deal with it because I know that you don't let loving him stop you from fighting him."

"Of course I don't!" she said, a touch indignantly. "I can love him and still know that he's wrong."

"Then there's the difference between us." She let the words hang. Chatoya's eyes widened, green and dark and round as fairy rings. "I didn't care what Alex did. I loved him beyond reason, beyond right or wrong. As long as he was mine, I didn't care what he did. I even helped him."

The shame swept over her, hot and prickling.

"Lisa?" Chatoya said in a thin, puzzled voice. "What are you saying?"

She closed her eyes on her friend. "I murdered people. I killed them because Alex needed them dead, and I loved him." The laugh choked her throat. "I loved him more than life itself. Their lives. All their lives."

She heard a muted gasp, footsteps, and then air brushed her as the door opened. The last thing she heard was a slam before she was left alone, as she had always suspected she would be if they knew the truth.

_Be my mirror, my sword and shield  
My missionaries in a foreign field  
For some reason I can't explain  
Once you go there was never, never an honest word  
That was when I ruled the world_

X - X - X - X - X

Thank you for reading! I would adore hearing anything you have to say.


	5. Chapter Four

Good afternoon. Here, punctual, and hopefully punctuated!

Huge thanks to everyone who commented last time - thank you **Queen of Slayers, Shang Leopard, Mandy**, **Clairavance, Jessa, LifeSucksWithoutVamps, Shelli**, and last but in no way least, the lovely **Serafina**. You are all _thoroughly_ wonderful.

I adore hearing what you think. Criticism is very much welcome, and helps me improve, so please fire away!

Thank you to my wonderful beta, MorbiDreamscape! Next part for July 18th  
- Ki

**Long Lost Part Four**

_Scarlet starlet and she's in my bed  
A candidate for my soul mate bled  
Push the trigger and pull the thread  
I've got to take it on the otherside__  
- Otherside, Red Hot Chilli Peppers_

The light from the restaurant filtered through the windows, leaving soft gold pools on the street. Lisa stood outside, hesitating, sequinned bag clutched in her hands. She felt out of place in her heels and lurid top. In contrast she could not help but think of Guinevere, sweeping down the steps of Isca with her skin gold against russet wool, bare-footed, her smile all the adornment she needed.

She'd tamed a roomful of men close to violence with that smile. Everything she did was slow and calm, her hips rolling like breaking waves with every step, a lingering glance that said everything and nothing, her words measured.

Where Alex went, Guinevere followed. Only with him was her calm disrupted, conversations descended into a hiss of furious argument, her face livid and all the lovelier for it.

Lisa had always felt gauche beside her; now the mere memory of Guinevere was enough to diminish her, shrunk inside her skin to a girl who was uncertain again, her world toppled again.

She had never had that effortless confidence with men; there had been Alex, and in his absence, only the fear of his return. For fifteen hundred years she travelled alone, lost in crowds, passing the time in idle conversation that never moved beyond the safe and the impersonal.

Eventually, she stumbled into Ryars Valley. She fell in love, the unrequited kind. She reached out and was slapped back.

And then Vaje came along. Candid, passionate, tender, he'd offered nothing more than a good time, and that had been enough. Neither of them wanted to get too close, but somehow he hadn't left Ryars Valley, and a fling had become a relationship.

A strange relationship, true, one more to do with friendship than love, quieter and warmer than she'd ever been used to, but a relationship all the same. And it hurt her to think that it might end tonight.

Guinevere would have known what to say; she would have swayed in, the perfect opening on her lips, using her beauty to frame her emotions as a jeweller might set a fine stone. But Lisa wasn't Guinevere and she didn't know where to begin.

She was afraid she knew where it would end.

All she could offer Vaje was the truth, and hope he would understand.

X - X - X - X - X

The minute the door opened, Chatoya almost tumbled into Jepar's arms.

"What's wrong?" he said with some alarm, steadying her.

She took a deep breath and tried to organise her muddled thoughts. "Lisa..."

"Her soulmate?" he said, eyes blazing. "I'll-"

"No." She caught him before he could rush off in true heroic style and get pounded into something resembling mashed potato. "Not her soulmate. _Lisa_."

He blinked. "What's she done?"

"She killed someone."

She waited for shock, for anger, for disbelief. All she got was a thoughtful stare, then Jepar said, "Oh," as if it made perfect sense.

She'd told him she was dating Blue and he'd nearly had a heart attack. She told him one of his friends was a murderer, which was surely far worse, and all he could say was 'Oh'?

"Are you in shock?" she said suspiciously.

"No." He gave her a level look. "But I think you are."

"Of course I am! She _killed_ someone."

"If you're going to have this reaction every time you hear that, you'd better get a Valium prescription," Jepar advised, a grin starting to hook up his mouth. "In case you've forgotten, you just inherited a couple of hundred assassins. I hear they're big on killing. And you're doing the extremely nasty with Blue Malefici. It's a bit late to get the wobbles about murder, isn't it?"

"That's different!" she squeaked. "I already know they're all murdering bastards! But...but it's _Lisa_."

He guided her into the living room as if he thought she might fall down. "She hasn't killed anyone since we've known her," he said with what he apparently thought was perfect logic.

Chatoya stared at his calm face, wondering if the world had gone mad. "But she did."

"Did she tell you why?"

She tried to remember. Her mind was spinning. "Because Alex wanted her to. Because she loved him."

"That doesn't sound like the Lisa I know," he murmured.

"No..."

"In fact, it sounds like she's changed a lot." He cocked his head, eyes gentle. "I've heard that can happen in a thousand years or so."

She took in, and then his words registered. "Are you saying I'm overreacting?"

He gave her a faint grin. "I'm going to go with _yes_. You're not thinking about this. Look at what Malefici made us do when he put his mind to it. He got me to give you dragon powers. He nearly got you to start a war. This Alex guy used to run Nightfire too."

He was right. Of course he was right, and she was acting like a hysterical fool. She groaned. "It's just..." She tried to gather the words. "Everything that's happened...we've all changed so much. But Lisa hadn't. She was still the same – she was still kind and fun and...and safe. And now she's not who I thought-"

"I think she is," Jepar said firmly. "I think she's the same person we've always known. But I think she _was _a different person hundreds of years ago. You can't judge her on the past, Toya. She's our friend - that hasn't changed." His smile faded; he looked solemn, abruptly older. "People make mistakes. D'you think all of us haven't done things we're ashamed of?"

The secrets hovered between them like wasps. She had never known what had brought him here. Jepar never talked about it; she had learned not to ask. She had always accepted it, always known that something lay across him like a shadow.

And she thought of her own mistakes, of the things she had nearly done, and worse, the things she had done.

"I just wanted someone to be safe," she croaked, and put her head in her hands.

She felt his weight as he sank onto the sofa beside her, and put a brotherly arm about her. "I know. But think how boring it'd be if we were."

"I'd take boring."

"Tough," he said, and gave her a squeeze. "You've got exciting. Now come on, let's think about how we can help Lisa fight her creepy werewolf stalker."

She let him comfort her. And she thought of Lisa, and wondered who she had been, and what could possibly have changed her so much, but it seemed to her that she already knew the answer: her own transformation was answer enough, her old life discarded like a chrysalis.

What soulmates we have, she thought. Destined to love us, destined to hurt us, and always, always destined to change us.

X - X - X - X - X

In the clearing, the rumble of voices was low and constant. Alex insinuated himself into one of the smaller groups and flashed an inviting smile at the girl sat smoking on the very fringe.

She stared back flatly. Her smeared eyeliner made her eyes huge bruises in the evening light, her mouth set sullenly about the cigarette. "Not interested."

"In what?" he enquired breezily. He reached into the power he'd gained from the Lethe and let it spread above them all, a net as thin and fine as hair. Memory and forgetting. Two abilities that struck to the core of what it meant to live, to think, to experience.

"Anything you think you might get." Her cynical expression said she'd seen it all, and he was not on her 'fifty things to do before you die' list.

"So polite conversation's out then?"

She blew a cloud of smoke at him, and he endured it, recognising it as a test, another way of marking territory. "Conversation, you can have."

"And a name, perhaps?"

"Felicity. My friends call me Flick." Just in case there was any doubt, she flicked her copper hair from her eyes to nail him with a hard stare. "You aren't one of them."

"Agreed," he said lazily. That prickly veneer was very intriguing. He had little doubt it was only surface deep; the knuckles of her hand were white as the cigarette. "Did you know that your name means 'lucky'?"

She gave a bark of a laugh. "So I'm told." She gestured to the campsite, the grubby sleeping bags, the bags of junk food, the dwindling fire. "Look at all this luck I've had."

"I thought it wasn't so bad." This from the boy Lisa knew; where Felicity was all tension and energy, he felt as hollow as a reed. "Isn't that what you keep telling me?"

"It isn't compared to where you'd be otherwise," the girl said tersely. "Alex, meet Cern. He's an idiot."

"Thanks," said Cern.

His face was different to the one that Alex had glimpsed in Lisa's mind; he compared the two, curious, and one seemed the skeleton beneath the other – as if unhappiness had melted away the flesh and the life from his features. There was no vibrancy in his voice, and only tiredness in his eyes.

"Pleasure," snapped Felicity.

"I feel like I'm missing something," Alex hinted.

Cern gave him a tight smile. His voice was harsh. "Me too."

"She couldn't have survived," Felicity said as if it was an old argument.

Cern closed his eyes, fingers rubbing at his brow. He seemed translucent, bones and regret and the faint blue tracery of veins. "No one gave her the chance."

"Yeah, they did." Ash flaked to the floor as Felicty pointed her cigarette at him. "She nearly killed you."

"She loved me." His voice was a little more than a whisper.

"I'm not denying that," Felicity said flatly. "She'd have loved you while she tore you piece from piece, loved you with your blood on her hands, loved you up to the damn moment you died. You don't get it, do you? It doesn't matter that she loved you. It wouldn't have stopped her."

Cern was breathing hard, teeth half-bared. "You don't know-"

"_She_ knew. She chose to die."

"Amazing how many people choose to die when Malefici gets involved," Cern snapped. "No one gave her a chance, no one gave us a chance – if I'd had time, if they'd let me..."

Her laugh was a bark, warning as much as mockery. "You still think love conquers all?"

"Yes!" Cern spat, and Alex was ambushed by the grief that poured from him, spreading out along the web of power like a flood, dark and voracious and terrifying in its intensity.

And at its centre, a memory so strong it blazed with intensity: a girl with pale green eyes and a shock of blond hair marred only by a streak of livid red. Her lips were parted, slack, astonished; the moment of recognition, of innocence.

Alex recognised her. He'd seen her portrait in Nightfire's archives, faded by light and time. And he'd seen her face above him, teeth stained with his blood. She was one of theirs, an early – and regrettable – creation of the Furies.

Jallakri ap Ganra. A werewolf who gave herself to death, mistaking it for love, and came back a monster.

"Then there's no hope for you," Felicity said bluntly.

Cern stood, quivering. "That's what you thought about her," he said as he left, his face alight with anger. "And you're wrong."

X - X - X - X - X

He was sat in a table at the corner, bronze in the candlelight, a handsome man frowning at a menu. He looked up at the click of her heels; a slow, sure smile spread over him, and Vaje Chusson stood up before she could tell him not to.

"You're late," he accused, amusement in his voice. "But probably worth the wait."

"Probably?"

"Depends on the quality of your conversation, doesn't it?"

She struggled to produce a smile, and the result must have looked feigned, because he raised an eyebrow.

"I know that look, Lise. Confess. Who or what is bothering you?"

"Who and what," she said, and sat, ignoring his frown as he did the same. In the intimate setting, he was uncomfortably close, their feet brushing under the table. "I have to tell you something."

"Oh?" His eyes had grown distant, cold. He looked that way when he was with Chatoya, discussing Pursang. "I get the feeling I'm not going to like it."

"No," she agreed, and stretched out to touch his hand. He was motionless as marble, jaw tight. "I...told you I was thirty."

"How old are you?" His voice was emotionless, the words fired at her like bullets.

"Over fifteen hundred years old."

"Hell of a lie."

The waiter came and poured water for them. They sat in tense silence until he had gone.

"There's more," she said. "I have a soulmate."

A muscle flickered in his cheek. "Do you now."

"His name is Alexandros."

That broke his mask; his eyes widened, shocked, and he sputtered, "Alexandros of Nightfire? Ambrosius Aurelianus?"

"Yes."

He let out a low whistle. "Jesus. Then that makes you..."

She looked straight at him. She had seen so many emotions in his eyes: laughter, affection, astonishment, anger. But he'd never looked at her as he did now, as if she were a stranger, and a dangerous one at that. "It makes me the woman who left him."

"Lisanor," he mused. "No wonder your face looked so familiar when we met. I've seen your picture in the vaults. The woman who lost the battle and won the war."

"It doesn't feel that way now. Alex has found me. He wants me back."

His eyes were puzzled. "You say that like it's a bad thing."

"It is."

"He's your soulmate," he said, voice rough, bewildered. It sounded much like pain, but she couldn't understand why. "You loved him once, didn't you?"

"I learned not to love him," she said. "I got smarter."

The candles lent new softness to his face, casting him in gold and brown. "What do you need me for?"

"Help me," she implored, and clutched at his arm, trying to reach past his shock, past the distance he had put between them. "I need to know what he's capable of. He went to the Lethe in Hades – I need to know what that means. Toya said you used to work on the archives..."

"I did. But...that's all myth. No one really knows now."

"I have to fight him," she whispered. "I can't be his again."

"I can look, but all I can give you are educated guesses."

"That'll do. Anything will do." Everything in his manner had subtly changed, and it took her a moment to understand. All the affection was gone from him – his kindness was impersonal, that of a good man, and nothing more.

The words slipped from her before she even knew they were on her tongue. "What about us?"

Something flickered through his eyes. His voice was calm. "What about us?"

"You...me..."

"It was only for a while. I'd say you've got bigger things to worry about." He drew back from her, and she was startled at how much it hurt. "You have a soulmate. You don't need me confusing things."

She wanted to protest, but he had abandoned her so easily that she left mute, robbed of words as easily as she was robbed of him. Had it really meant so little? Was that all it had been, a good time, temporary as the ever-changing moon?

"I've lost my appetite," he said gruffly. "I think we'd better leave. If I'm going to pull together any information quickly, I'd better head off tonight. It's a long drive back to the archives."

This morning he had kissed her awake, and tomorrow, he would be gone, vanishing as easily as a footprint in the sand.

"Vaje..."

He stood quickly, as if he was eager to be gone. "It's something to tell the lads, isn't it?" he said. "The woman who broke Britain let me into her life for a little while."

Was that all she was? A story?

He didn't kiss her goodbye. He left her in the restaurant, and it seemed to her that he fled, driven away by the horrors of her past, by the vast, monstrous shadow of Alexandros and Lisanor and the last desperate days of the Britons.

X - X - X - X - X

"Sorry you had to see that," muttered Felicity. "Old argument. He's an idiot."

Alex watched the woods where the boy had vanished. "What happened, if you don't mind me asking?"

She snorted. "Well, you've heard most of it. He met his soulmate. Turned out to be this – this monster that the Furies made to kill halfbreeds. And Cern, well, he's about as much of a mongrel as they come. Bit of witch, bit of wolf, even a bit of vampire way back in the family crypt. Good with spells, but a lousy shifter. She attacked him, then her conscience attacked her, and she left him just about alive. She couldn't live with herself, so she asked the Furies to kill her. They did. We all lived happily ever after, except Cern, who thinks he could have snuggled her inner psycho into submission or something."

"And he blames you?"

She took a drag, eyes half-closed. "Sometimes. Mostly he blames his friends, because they let her die. Smartest thing they ever did, if you ask me, but Cern doesn't see it that way. He won't talk to most of them. Came to us instead." She opened her eyes and they were cynical, hard as pebbles. "His soulmate was a werewolf too. He thinks that he's somehow closer to her. Bullshit, of course, but you can't tell him that."

He filed away the information. Intriguing, and perhaps useful. It didn't explain why this boy haunted Lisanor so, but some of his jealousy had faded. If love it was, it was one-sided and hopeless. Perhaps it was merely friendship. Either way, he would tolerate it unless Cern proved some sort of threat.

"You seem determined to try," he remarked.

There was a long pause. "He frightens me," she said at last. "He doesn't live for anything except grief. I know where that goes. I've seen it before. I don't want to see it again."

"A friend?" he guessed, soft.

The bleakness in her face touched him. "My sister. She was sweet, so good, you know. And she just...she got lost somewhere along the way. She forgot how to be happy. And then she forgot why she wanted to live." She gazed out into the darkness. "I miss her."

The memory rose up like smoke, hazy, fractured. Alex saw her only in glimpses; a shy smile, long eyelashes, bitten nails and clattering bracelets.

"I can hardly remember her face now," Felicity said slowly. "I don't have any photos."

The concept was alien to him. Since he drank of the Lethe, he could forget nothing. Every memory he had was as finely delineated as calligraphy, names and faces an endless litany. Sometimes he thought it would be a mercy to forget. Sometimes he closed his eyes only to see the dead, peaceful beneath the bloodstains, silent, united in their stillness where he was ever moving, ever lonely.

He hesitated, then pity decided him. "Perhaps I could help."

Her stare sharpened, edged with suspicion. "What do you mean?"

"I have a gift," he said. "A small thing, but...but useful. I never forget a face. If you let me, I can find your memories of her. I can't help you to remember, but I know a girl who can draw. She could put a picture together for you, so you won't forget her."

He was counting on Lisanor's goodness, on her need to help others. Merlin would be stark in her memories still, surely. And even if she knew it for an excuse to be near her, it wouldn't matter. She would do it, knowing the value of memory, knowing how soon it withered into tatters.

"Sounds a strange sort of gift," she said shortly. "For a wolf."

"Not for a Fury," he said, and she blanched. "Former. I quit."

"You don't quit 'em," she said in a voice rough as gravel. "No one does."

"I did," he said. "Over a thousand years ago. They knew more than murder in those days. They knew enough to let me go in peace."

Her breath whistled, high and fearful. "Who are you?"

"My name is Alex, like I told you. Do you really think it's wise to know any more?"

"No..." she whispered. "No. I don't think I want your help either."

He reached out, and laid a hand on hers. She twitched, but didn't draw away. Perhaps fear held her. "No price," he said quietly. "I promise."

Her eyes were wide, frozen on him.

"I'll show her to you, just for a moment. Then you can decide whether you want my help or not. I know what it is to carry your dead with you, and I can at least give you back her face."

Her longing spiralled up around him like a cool wind, carrying her broken memories; flash of fingers applying blusher, of skipping feet, of eyes as grey and dark as iron. It outweighed her fear of him – it outweighed everything.

She made a small sound in her throat. Alex gently touched his fingers to her temple, to the pulse that raced there. If she'd drawn back, he would have let her; hurting her would gain him nothing.

But she stayed still, her eyes subsumed by yearning. He reached into her mind, chasing down those shattered images. He saw nothing else; he wanted to see nothing else. All he needed was this one memory, as a gift, as a lure, as a penance.

He saw...

_Karen..._

An open hand, pills scattered about it. Foam had dried about her mouth, thin and white. Her hair was neatly plaited, her make-up pristine on her discoloured, swollen skin. The smell was horrific; she had marinated in the summer heat for nearly three days, the car an oven discarded by the lake where they'd come when they were children.

That hadn't been so long ago – two summers, three summers, playing in the boats, glancing at the boys while their parents pretended ignorance and practiced caution.

_Karen!_ he heard her cry. _Karen, why did you leave me on my own?_

An open hand. Pills. Foam. Plaits and lipstick and rot.

The image barred his way like a guard. No wonder her memories were disintegrating as Flick tried to remember the living girl and forget the dead one, tried to separate the two like an egg, not understanding that they were indivisible.

An open hand, fingers like an undone plait. Pills as white as foam, lipstick coating her rotting flesh-

But this wasn't his nightmare; Alex shoved past it, walking back through time, resurrection trailing in his wake.

An open hand, stretching for a frisbee. Foam on her lip as she guzzled a milkshake, leaving a livid pink mark on the glass. Slowly, he took each aspect of that dreadful memory, and found life in it, found something sweeter than sorrow.

It's the great secret, the one we never tell you. There is life even in death, though we name it memory, and think it only a poor shadow.

Lipstick smeared on Karen's laughing mouth as she applied it for the first time; she twirled through the garden, squealing when she trod on a rotten plum and scraping it off with little yelps. Two little girls crammed in the back of a car, opening the windows to blast the heat away, a car full of motion and noise, more than a self-selected coffin for a girl who had run out of hope.

He rebuilt her, took her from her sad limp shell and made her real again. And at last Karen Serafine stood before him, a memory as brilliant as the North Star.

And then he stepped out of Felicity's mind. He was back in the woods, sat at a rickety picnic table.

Felicity's eyes were wet. "I saw her," she said. "For a moment, I saw her...but she's gone."

"I can show her to you again," he said.

She swallowed, and then nodded.

He took her hand, laying his web of power over her, but this time, it wasn't set to catch something, but to free it. He spilled the memory of Karen into it, bright-shining, evergreen, for their eyes only.

"Over there," he said in a voice too low for anyone else to hear, and looked pointedly into the trees.

She followed his gaze, and gave a soft, long gasp. "Oh, Karen..."

She clutched his hand as her sister appeared from the shadows, spinning from them like a top, head thrown back to the sky. Her laughter cascaded over them, and she whirled past them, plaits swinging, all around the clearing and the oblivious wolves.

"Can't they see her?" Felicity whispered.

"No. She's just for us."

Karen had gone full circle, and she stopped, laid a hand on a tree and looked at them. Her smile was shy and sweet, her eyes vast with mystery. Something in her face reminded him of Lisanor, left him breathless with sudden pain and sudden love.

She stepped back into the shadows, and faded away.

Alex knew he would carry her face with him forever, just as he bore all the others. That was the price of the Lethe – that he remembered the dead, all the dead, where others forgot.

"Thank you," Felicity said, her voice thick. "You can't know what it means to see her...to be able to remember her like that."

Her eyeliner had run. He reached up and brushed it away with his finger, and found he was trembling.

"Maybe I can."

"You're not like any of the Furies I've met," she said, wonder in her gaze.

He had to smile. "I should hope not, cherie."

"You said – you said I could have a picture."

He supposed the small victory should have been gratifying. Instead, he felt sad, old, lost. "Yes. I'll make sure you get it."

"If you need anything in return-"

That was his opening; in days gone, he'd have eased in smooth as a snake, without a trace of guilt. Now he looked at her earnest face, damp with tears, and felt a wrench. But he couldn't pass up on it. It was too important. "I could use a friend with some local knowledge," he said.

She smiled. "Then you'd better call me Flick."

_I heard your voice through a photograph  
I thought it up, it brought up the past  
Once you know you can never go back  
I've got to take it on the otherside_

X - X - X - X - X_  
_

Comments loved!


	6. Chapter Five

Late by a mere smidgen – an hour. Humble apologies for that, and enormous thanks to the wonderful, fantastic people who reviewed last time round.

Thank you: **untilhellfreezesover, Clairavance, Hera Night, Chocolatetree**, **Shang Leopard, Ambrosien, nefarious nature**, **Mandy**, **Jessa**, **Bec**, **Izzy**, **wasurera**, **Shelli**, **laurakyna, Queen of Slayers, dunk the donut, timeless**, **Anterrabae, Daugain**, **connor** and last, but by no means least, the divine **Dactyl**.

Lyrics come from _Waking Up Beside You_ by Stabbing Westward. It's a beautiful, savage, slight creepy song about obsession. Go listen to it.

I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did writing it. Thank you to MorbiDreamscape, my fantastic beta-reader!

**Long Lost Part Five**

_You promised that you'd not abandon me__  
And kissed my fears away  
But I woke up to that day_

Her high heels clattered on the kitchen floor as she wrenched them off. There were blisters on her feet, but the twinge of pain was distant, as everything was. The walk back had been a blur.

Whatever she had expected, this hadn't been it. Lisa had been prepared for anger, for disappointment, even for hate. She had not been prepared for indifference. That Vaje was even capable of it stunned her, and made her think that she had misread him terribly.

Just another Fury, playing yet another game.

Vaje was gone. Chatoya was gone. How long before the rest of them followed?

In a daze, trying not to think about either of them, she did humdrum things that kept her hands busy and her mind from probing too deeply. She emptied the dishwasher, cleaned the sides, put the kettle on-

And then she realised that she'd brought out two mugs, and one of them was layered with sugar.

She didn't know how long she stood there, stupidly staring at it. The rattle of keys in the door jolted her; she looked up, hoping beyond hope.

When Chatoya came in, shivering, nose red from the cold, it was a bitter disappointment.

"Lisa?" With one quick glance, the witch took her in: the glitzy top, make-up, the pair of mugs. "I wasn't expecting you two back this early." She took a quick breath. "But it's good that you are. I...I..."

Lisa stared at her. She didn't think she could take any more. But she couldn't seem to walk away; she couldn't seem to pierce the layer of cold and apathy that encased her.

"I want to apologise," Chatoya said in a rush, green eyes wide and worried. "I just completely overreacted. You needed my help, and I freaked out. It doesn't matter what you did then. You're my friend, and...and if it wasn't for you, I don't know what I'd be. No, well, I do...I'd be possessed by a genocidal dragon, and I'd be a murderer, and I'd be lost."

Chatoya was wringing her hands, but her dignity was otherwise unassailable; she didn't spare herself, she didn't look away or soften her words.

"Running out like that was... gods, appalling. And thoughtless. You'd never have done that to me and I'm ashamed of myself. It was unforgivable. But...but..." Her smile was watery. "All the same, I hope you can forgive me. I'm sorry."

Slowly the words filtered through. And she could feel her patina of calm crumbling; one of them had come back. Her hands trembled; the mug slipped through her fingers and crashed onto the floor in a mess of pottery and sugar and coffee grinds.

"He left." The words were a croak, because she had to force them out. "He left me."

"Wh..." And Chatoya looked at the mugs, and looked at Lisa's discarded shoes, the matching pair a sure sign she was no Cinderella, and said quietly, "No."

Her legs went; she felt as if she was just water, boneless, shapeless, bound by gravity and physics and nothing as trivial as love or fidelity or strength. She staggered, and caught herself on the side, trembling.

"He left me, Toya." She didn't cry. Her voice was disbelieving, quiet, drained. "He didn't even kiss me goodbye. He just...he just went."

"Oh, Lisa," Chatoya breathed, and trod over the broken mug. Lisa sank into her hug, needing human contact, needing not to be alone. "Are you sure? That doesn't sound like Vaje."

"He said I didn't need him confusing things. I was – I was a story to tell his friends. A good story, that's all."

"He said _what?_" The outrage in her voice was reassuring. "He might be a Fury, but he'll learn the meaning of the word when I catch up with him. I'll go completely Cougar on him."

Lisa gave a choked giggle, feeling steadier. The hurt was there, raw as a burn, but seeing Chatoya helped to assuage it. She took a deep breath, stepped back and swallowed down the lump in her throat. "No. It's all right."

"It is not all right!" Her mouth was a grim line. "I'll-"

"No. You won't." She struggled for meaning, for the truth. "Toya, I know the Furies. You can't let your personal life affect how you run Pursang, because they will know that I matter, and they will know that all of the others matter, and then they will use us to hurt you. I knew what I was getting into. Alex...Alex at least taught me that."

It didn't matter that she'd thought Vaje was different. She had to protect Chatoya as best she could.

"If you're sure..."

"I am."

Chatoya sighed. "All right. I won't mention it to Vaje. It's between you and him."

No. Whatever had been between them was gone – nothing, fog fading in sunlight, the ragged space of something broken.

"Thank you," she mumbled.

"Now." Chatoya gave her a wry grin. "I happen to know the best way to get over a man too stupid to know what a mistake he's just made."

Something eased in her. There was no awkwardness in Chatoya's manner, no sign that this was an act.

"What does it involve?"

"Tea, chocolate, ice-cream, facials and the world's funniest movie."

She roused a watery smile. "Well...when you put it like that."

X - X - X - X - X

It had begun to snow. Vaje walked in it grimly, shrugging on regret with his coat and keeping his head down. He felt the weight of his life – six hundred years, folded inside his unchanging, unaging form. It seemed to him that he should have seen it all by now; the days should have rolled off him like water, such small scenes mere cameos, but he could not get Lisa out of his head.

Too many damn regrets.

When he saw the phone booth, the need to speak overwhelmed him. He dropped in some change and called a familiar number.

It rang for minutes. He was patient, knowing her ways. At last she picked it up, but said nothing.

"It's me," he said.

"Vaje. Why are you calling me so late?" Her voice was cool. Faith Tacarnan wasn't moved by much these days; even old friends got nothing more than a thin veneer of civility.

"Thought I might come and visit you."

Silence. The snow batted at the glass, the world a whirl of grey and he at its centre, huddled in the booth.

"What's wrong?" she said, her voice gentler. "You only come to me when you need to lick your wounds."

"Guess I've got some wounds, then."

"I thought you were doing well there," she said. "Ingratiating yourself with our new mistress. Lance said you'd even found a woman who could take you on."

Those words pierced him. "Things change."

"Oh," she said, the sound soft and sad. "Is that it? Did you mend your heart just in time to break it again?"

The sympathy in her voice undid him; he felt his calm unravelling until he was nothing but knots and fraying ends, nothing but this. "No fool like an old fool."

"What happened?"

"She found her soulmate."

"And left you?"

"No." He tried hard not to think of Lisa; disobedient memories came fluttering down with the snow, translucent and transient. "I left her. I couldn't...I couldn't stand in the way."

Another face replaced her: this one as much a relic as the temples in far-off lands. Red hair, grey eyes, a laugh as raucous as a jackdaw. He had lived so long without Elise that he'd thought he might forget her, but it didn't happen. She had been his soulmate, and his wife, and his first love. His life with her had been savage, an existence marred by prejudice and hatred, but amidst the maelstrom, he had found in her an oasis, a vast and silent space containing only the two of them and love.

He never thought of his son. It hurt too much.

They had died. One of Nightfire's monsters had come for his son, and Elise had stood in its way. It killed her; it killed his child. And he had been too late.

He knew what it was to lose your soulmate. And he knew what it was to find them – to feel that the pilgrimage was at an end, that the miracle had come, that the world was radiant and personal.

He could not be the one to stand between Lisa and Alexandros. How could he deny her that?

The war was legend. A war forged in the heart; not the first, not the last. Only love could birth animosity so visceral and so lasting. He had seen the story play itself out a hundred times. He knew its end, knew its twists, knew that hate was only the distorted shadow of something far greater, as terrible and brilliant as the stars themselves.

He could not bear to see it once more.

"Not everyone loves their soulmate," Faith said. Her voice was quiet, but firm.

"Not everyone. But Lisanor and Alexandros?"

Her gasp crackled down the line. "All I did," she quoted softly, "I did for love, and lack of love."

He closed his eyes. "Yes."

Her voice was kind. "Stay as long as you want."

He put down the receiver. The cold air burned his throat, and he let it freeze him through and through. He had survived the centuries before he came here, and he would survive the years that came. He had stayed knowing that death was indiscriminate, hunched at the heart of everything like gravity.

It came each night when the light vanished – it snuffed out candles, squashed mosquitoes, killed conversations. It was more than ashes to ashes and dust to dust. You could die of embarrassment or laughter; and equally, once lost, innocence could not be resurrected like Lazarus from the tomb. Every second that passed was a death, every silence a wake for the conversations gone.

It was a harsh truth, and a simple one.

Everything died. The Furies had taught him that. A matched pair of graves in a dingy graveyard had taught him that. A candlelit confession in a restaurant had taught him that.

Everything. Even hope.

X - X - X - X - X

_You carry your dead in your bones. One day you'll wake up and find that's all that's left under your skin, the dead and the dying, and you caught between them._

Alex twisted uneasily. Whether it was calling back Flick's sister, or merely his proximity to Lisanor, memories crawled over him like woodlice. Even in wolf form, he couldn't get comfortable. Around him, the Pack were sprawled, some human and some wolf, all in some stage of sleep.

_You carry your dead in your bones. _

He didn't want to think about Morgan le Fey, crouched and mad, her fabled beauty smeared with dirt. These woods were too much like her ramshackle bower, cobbled together from fallen trees and driftwood. Too close. Too alive. Even the wind in the trees seemed an echo of her whispers, half-prophecy, half-gibberish.

_One day you'll wake up and find that's all that's left under your skin, the dead and the dying and you caught between them._

Too many of both were embedded in his memories like splinters. Merlin and Galahad. Tristan, poor Tristan shrieking on the cliff. Morgan herself, torn between her twin natures and destroyed by the dichotomy.

He got up, careful not to disturb Flick. She was a small heap of fur, nose buried firmly in her tail, twitching with wolf dreams. For all her weary air, there was something unspoilt about her, a kind of quiet strength. On a whim, he left a net of power about her so that no one would disrupt her sleep.

One or two of the others eyed him but made no comment as he stole out into the woods.

His human form slipped off him like oil. It felt good to be on four feet, the night opening up before him in a great wave of sound and scent and texture. For long moments, he ran for nothing more than the joy of it.

Things were simpler here. Emotions were the dream of the human huddled at the back of his mind. Wolves didn't mourn a woman so extraordinary that it had seemed trivial to fling a nation at her in warfare. Wolves didn't regret. They knew nothing of dark choices made in dark caves, nothing but this: the soft night, the pack and the moon high above like a fang.

He ran until he ached, and then because he could not run forever, he changed back.

He was Alexandros again, with all that meant. He remembered, because he could not forget. He carried his dead in his bones.

When he got back to the Pack's territory, he shuffled back into his clothes. Being a werewolf had many benefits, but public nudity wasn't one of them. Frankly, after the first time he'd woken up in someone's doorway (a drunken night – far too much shoddy Roman wine that an upcoming Senator had provided at an otherwise desperately dull soiree), he'd discovered that there was no deed so great, no speech so eloquent that it could ever erase people's memories of him edging down the streets of Rome with nothing to hide his shame but an urn he'd stolen from someone's porch.

Of course, he had been young and foolish then, long before the Furies claimed him as their own. No one but Neve even knew about that story. Except Lisanor. There was nothing – almost nothing – she had not known about him.

"Good run?"

He glanced over at the question.

Cern was sitting against a tree. There wasn't a hint of sleep in his eyes. His hands fell loosely between his bent legs, but his foot was tapping quickly, as if he couldn't keep still.

"Good enough. Don't you sleep?"

"Not really. I suppose Flick told you all about me. Aside from the fact I'm an idiot."

"A little about you." But not enough to explain how Lisa knew him, or why she thought of him with such affection. He wasn't the kind of person she was drawn to. She loved conflict, humour, vibrancy. Merlin had been like that, quick-fire and reckless. Tristan...well, Tristan let his heart lead him, and it led him right into a cold sword on a blustery cliff. "She said your soulmate died."

"My soulmate was murdered."

"More an execution than a murder, I heard," Alex said, needling him just a little.

"It was a crime. It was murder." His eyes were black as tar. "They tried her and they convicted her on nothing but their own bloody prejudice."

Alex raised his eyebrows. He remembered Jallakri's face, snarling, inhuman, her eyes as empty as her conscience. "And several gory deaths...?"

"Those weren't her fault."

"No? Whose were they?"

"Nightfire's. They made her."

"And perhaps they made a mistake," Alex murmured. A mistake he had tried to eradicate, with no success. All he had to show for it was a neat set of scars in his upper arm, raised bumps in the shape of Jallakri ap Ganra's teeth.

"No. The only mistake was killing her."

He shrugged. "What's done is done. You can't bring back the dead."

Something flickered in Cern's face – something fierce and devoted and familiar. "So they say."

He couldn't explain why he felt uneasy. "Meaning what?"

"Love conquers all," Cern said, and his voice was dreamy, ardent. "Isn't that what they say?"

_Omnia vincit amor._

Yes, they said that, and you brought it into your language and lost the meaning with it. Love conquers all, you say, as if that's something to be proud of. You've made it sweet and soppy and trite, but it's none of those things.

Love conquers all. It is an invader, a barbarian rampaging through us. It is a force of violence and of destruction. It doesn't negotiate, it doesn't reason. It conquers all: thought, sense, hope, trust. This isn't the love of red, red roses and chaste Hollywood kisses. This is the love that thinks you better dead than someone else's – this is the love of fist meeting flesh, of fingers on throats, the love of crumpled cars and divorce courts, the love that is so close to obsession that the difference is only in the eye of the beholder.

Love the tyrant. Love the butcher. Blood on the floor and words in the books. This is where the stories came from – the times when love conquered all, and the world screamed with the horror of it.

And who would know that better than I?

"I doubt that love can conquer death," he answered.

Cern's smile flashed, jagged, unsettling. "So does everyone else."

"But not you?" Alex asked, and now he let his powers roll out. Light as smoke, he slid into Cern's mind, forgotten as soon as he was noticed, the Lethe thick in his veins.

The memory was so strong he nearly choked on it. Woods lush and green with summer, high heat and the scent of leaves. He recognised the witch who ran Pursang, glimmering with power, her face full of anger, saying, _Fireblade – you remember him, the terrifying legend who's real, by the way – raised his wife Ryar from the dead, and I got possessed by Bhari – you know, the other terrifying legend who massacred her own people and just happens to have a magical connection to Fireblade and Ryar. And goodness me, what else happened in the midst of all that tedium? Blue tried to use us all to bring back the Burning Days by sacrificing Cougar, who'd been tortured by one of Blue's mad minions, and three other victims, and oh yes, Lisa nearly got fried by Fireblade, but don't worry, Cern, our bloody perfect little lives rushed in and saved us and we all sat down for tea and crumpets afterwards!_

Interesting times here, Alex thought with some wonder, but why does that intrigue Cern so?

It cut off. And began again, the witch in livid motion, hands raised and hair wild, the same words: _Fireblade – you remember him, the terrifying legend who's real, by the way – raised his wife Ryar from the dead..._

And again. Again. Until it was distilled down to one burning thought.

_Raised from the dead._

"What do I know?" Cern said quietly, but there seemed a kind of secret delight to him. The shadows fell oddly on his face, blotting out everything but the sheen on his lips. "I'm just an idiot."

All the while, the memory sang on like a siren.

Alex withdrew, disturbed. He knew that spell. He had been there when Merlin crafted it, had seen the consequences of it – and had ultimately been the one to fling it into a deep vault with a cautionary tale attached.

Someone had been foolish enough to ignore it.

_Raised from the dead._

His only reassurance was that Cern had nowhere near enough power to cast it successfully. He might dream it, he might hunger for it, but even if he found the scroll in his hands and the will to do what was necessary, he would go no further.

He could not help but pity the witch. If it had been love he felt for Jallakri, strange and deadly as she had been, it had fermented into something far more toxic: it was obsession that reached into the grave, through the dirt and the worms, to drag back the mouldering bones.

Perhaps he could even understand that need. Fifteen hundred years ago he had made a decision that he had regretted ever since. It had lost him Lisanor, and that had been no surprise, but now the time had come for change. He was weary of the promise he had made in Hades. Once, he had thought it outweighed the promises he made to her; he was no longer sure.

He knew obsession. But he knew death far better, and knew what disaster awaited Cern. Merlin was testament to that.

"Leave the dead in Hades and your memories, where they belong," he said flatly. Thoughts of Merlin crowded into his mind, sharp, flitting things. He turned away, wanting to lose himself in sleep; he needed the illusion of oblivion, if only for a few hours.

It seemed to him that he heard Morgan le Fey laughing, because the joke was on him.

_You carry your dead in your bones._

He wasn't the only one. Cern's whisper was slight enough that it barely stirred the air, but his hands ground into the earth as if he would tear his desires from it.

"That isn't enough."

_I miss...  
God, I miss  
Waking up beside you_

X - X - X - X - X

Thank you for reading! Thoughts adored...


	7. Chapter Six

Apologies for the length of time it has taken to update; this chapter is a little longer to make up for it. My huge thanks to the purely brilliant and kind people who reviewed last time – thank you **goblinishelves, Shelli**, **dunk the donut, Bec**, **Queen of Slayers, Shang Leopard, Lethe**, **Clairavance, Hera Night, Dactyl, Anterrabae, bunnies ate my baby, Ciel**, **Rose Kitty, nefarious nature**, and last but by no means least, the fabulous **Khansa**.

Thank you to MorbiDreamscape, my fabulous beta-reader.

Thoughts, comments and criticisms are very much adored! It all helps me improve.

Hope you enjoy - Ki

**Long Lost Part Six**

_ Fear is the brightest of signs  
The shape of the boundary you leave behind  
So sing all your questions to sleep  
The answers are out there in the drowning deep  
- Vienna Teng, Harbor_

They came to Britain on the back of a sea-storm that whipped the waves into a foaming fury and turned the sky to a great, churning swirl of grey and black. Nothing lit the bleak night but forks of lightning, illuminating the grim faces of the people pressed to the rails of the boat. It pitched and rocked on the water, climbing each towering wave as if it were a mountain, then crashing down amidst gouts of spray.

Lisanor was already bruised and aching from being flung against the sides. Soaked head to foot in salt water, she shivered uncontrollably and cursed the Empire and her owner.

Around her, men shouted and scurried, pulling at ropes while the sail flapped loudly overhead.

She felt a slap on her arm and turned to see the man who called himself Galahad offering her a waterskin. He didn't seem to feel the cold, even though he was just as sodden as she. His blond hair was cut short in a Centurion's style, his hands callused and scarred from battle. There was nothing friendly in his eyes, only disgust.

She shook her head. It wasn't as if she needed any more water.

He turned away, but a figure appeared behind him; her owner, shaking his head. His hair clung to his face, his dark eyes unreadable. Alexandros, he'd named himself, but in the fourteen days he had owned her, she hadn't grasped a word of his tongue beyond 'yes', 'no' and 'good morning'. This was the first time she had seen him from more than a distance.

He mimed drinking. She shook her head again.

His look was exasperated. Galahad shouted something in a tone that sounded as unfriendly as his stare.

She didn't say or do anything but stare back, careful not to meet his eyes. That might be construed as insolence, to be beaten out of her. Alexandros hadn't done so yet, but she didn't doubt he was waiting for an excuse. She had no intention of giving him one.

The ship lurched, and she staggered and fell.

She heard Galahad's booming laughter as she landed inelegantly at her owner's feet. Inches from his boots, she cursed silently. She hated this life, this night, this cold unforgiving sea and him.

Then she was being picked up; his voice was soft and gentle, murmuring things she supposed were meant to be comfort. His hands were steady, cocooned in leather gloves, and she found herself gazing at Alexandros, mere inches away.

She saw the shape of her name on his lips: _Lisanora. _

He looked right at her, eyes moving over her with a kind of fascination. She supposed she must seem as exotic as a tiger to him, and perhaps that novelty was why he had bought her. The bidding had gone on for some time, and from the rumble of sound when it had finished, she had sold for a good price.

She wanted to throw fistfuls of coin back in his face, to say that she was more than a thing to be bought and sold.

But she stayed silent, the scars of other slaves criss-crossing on her mind like a net.

He moved her hand to the rail, touch firm. And then, to her surprise, he swung off the thick cloak he wore and draped it over her.

From the astounded look on Galahad's face, Alexandros wasn't given to noble gestures.

She gazed at him, bemused. And he gave her a wry little smile, as if he wasn't quite sure why he'd done it either.

"Thank you," she said, meaning it.

He seemed to understand. His smile faded; the intensity in his eyes grew until they were dark and deep as the nights in Numidia, full of heat and the call of wild things.

She found her breath caught in her throat; the space between them was too small, his cloak on her shoulders as heavy as his gaze.

Then icy spray dashed against her face, and she raised a hand to wipe it away, blinking.

When she looked again, she saw nothing but his back, soon obscured by bodies and water. Only the cloak, full of the heat that burned in his eyes, said that he had been close, that in this stranger she had glimpsed some echo of her home even as she moved ever further from it.

X – X – X – X – X

When the alarm went off, she was almost shocked to find herself in her bed. She felt giddy and dream-drugged, as if the intervening years had not occurred at all, as if her heart still beat in human motion.

Lisa shook herself and scrambled out of bed. It was dark outside, but she plodded downstairs to flick on the kettle, banging on Chatoya's door on the way. Ten minutes of comfortable routine found the pair of them in the living room, furnished with tea and toast, breakfast TV murmuring in the background.

"I'm getting his files couriered over to me," Chatoya mumbled around a yawn. She was a picture of disarray in the morning – hair rumpled and loose, feet tucked under a cushion to fend off the cold. "I've asked Vaje to have a dig through the vaults too."

The mention of his name stung almost as much as the fact Chatoya trusted him so. "But won't we have all the files?"

"This is everything that can travel, and that's been translated," Chatoya informed her. "But some of the documents are old, and in other languages. I need Vaje for that."

It struck her that even in her towelling robe, Chatoya was a Fury. Her tone was business-like, her face calm and blank as paper. This was the professional – the girl of strength and wit and steel who had somehow emerged with the boldness of a butterfly shedding its chrysalis.

Then the witch smiled, and it was her friend sat there once more. "But we will need the boys for this. Apparently they needed a van to bring everything."

"That much?" she said, startled. "I had no idea he was that famous."

"Not just him. You too."

"Me?" she echoed. "I was just his slave. I mean, I turned out to be his soulmate, but that was coincidence."

"You made history," Chatoya said gently. "The Furies respect people who do that, even if they don't like them much."

It was something to remember, even if the rest of that mess was something to forget.

"The feeling's mutual," she muttered.

X – X – X – X – X

Heads turned as he walked in. Vaje still wasn't used to that.

His rise in the Furies had come recently and meteorically. Jacquiline Trehet had been ousted by Chatoya, and he had replaced her. It was only luck, but the weight of their eyes said they thought it design.

The archives were always busy. Initiates were studying while their teachers composed lessons; the little academic clusters were in corners and close to the doors. Deeper in were the researchers and the curious, digging through the intricately catalogued system. Beyond the double doors were the contract halls, full of the dead and the soon-to-be dead. There would be a few people there, researching marks and methods.

At the end of the contract halls lay a vast panelled wall. A door was hidden in it, accessible only to the chosen few. Beyond it, the vaults, and the most private, precious knowledge of the Furies: the lives and deaths of their own members.

"Chusson." Orelie Perette of Nightfire had a husky French accent and the kind of sweeping, sloe-black eyes that had made Anne Boleyn famous. "Back from the dead. I hear rumours you tangled with a dragon."

He gave her nothing but a long look. "You hear right."

Her eyes widened; she leaned in with pseudo-concern. "Is it true?" Her tone bordered on insolent. He felt weary – so the game had begun, the political dance, the tricks and traps. He had been raised up, and like anything set on high, he was just another target. "After all, you look very...undercooked."

He met her proximity with his own: he stepped into her, deliberately aggressive. Then he took her hand, fighting the urge to just wrench it and let the sound of her bones break the silence. That would be simple, but not wise.

Instead he drew her hand to his side. She could feel the ridged scars through his clothes; he heard her soft intake of breath. Except for her fingers, testing the savagery of his wound, she was still.

When she stepped back, it was a retreat. She was shaken, belief wide in her eyes.

"Not at all undercooked, darlin'," he said into the silence. "More well done."

She stared at him – and then she ducked her head, the tiniest gesture of respect. But coming from a woman who had felled princes and unmade kingmakers, it was victory. "Well done indeed," she said, too quiet for anyone else to hear. "You are what you always promised to be. _Alea iacta est_."

"It's no game, Orelie," he said, part-warning, part-truth.

"I knew that the day I went to the Phlegethon, and burned," she said quietly. "But Hades did not seem to mark you so deeply. What changed, Vaje?"

He touched her chin, making sure she had no idea how her words chafed.

"Me," he whispered, and she flinched back.

She stood aside and let him pass. And the others, who had seen Nightfire's black widow withdraw to her webs and her silence, took note. The nods were a little deeper, the eyes more firmly averted as he went through them all. Past the students and the teachers, through the contract hall to the aged door of the vaults.

Words had been carved in it: they were said to echo those some forsaken soul had etched into the entrance to Hades.

_Facilis descensus Averno;  
Noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis_

_Easy is the descent to the underworld  
Night and day, the gates of Hades are open._

It was both joke and reminder: those who were kept in these dark vaults, pressed onto paper as stories or pictures, had made that lonely descent, had passed the first of the gates and breathed the very air of the underworld. He was among their number – and now he would go among them, and follow Alexandros beyond Hades because Lisa had asked him, and he could not refuse.

He spoke his keyword, and breathed on the lock gently. It swung open, and he entered the darkness.

_Alea iacta est_, Orelie had said, the die is cast.

She was more right than she knew. Vaje hardly understood why he was even here, helping such a futile endeavour, except that Lisa had asked, and he could not refuse.

Common sense said he should walk away. He was a Fury, and he knew better than to be caught up in the knots of relationships. To get involved in a relationship as thorny and visceral and violent as that of Lisanor and Alexandros...stupid. Hopeless.

But she had asked, and he could not refuse. He could not give himself any answer beyond that.

As he climbed down the stairs, the door swinging shut with a hollow boom, he did not explore that need any further. It was dangerous. She was dangerous. And as he made his way down the vaults which filled the ground like great, unconsecrated tombs, he knew only one truth.

They were right. The descent was easy.

X – X – X – X – X

It was late morning when the doorbell buzzed.

"Let's hear it for the boys," Lisa said cheerfully.

Chatoya glanced at the clock. "Before midday? There's no chance Cougar's awake yet. It must be the courier."

She got up. Lisa heard the creak of the door as it opened, following by voices murmuring.

Then Chatoya called in a dreamy, chilling sing-song, "Lisa...it's for you."

Instinct told her who it had to be. She swallowed back her fear and picked up the baseball bat they kept for special occasions – and occasional murderers – before she went out to the hall.

Chatoya was stood at the door, her eyes vague. The scent of magic hung in the air – the sharp smell of ozone and herbs. She didn't look hurt.

Much to her disappointment, Alex looked equally unharmed as he loitered in the dregs of the snowfall, hands held up in a show of Artful Dodger innocence. "I wouldn't recommend it," he remarked. "I don't react well to violence. As you should know."

"What have you done to her?" she demanded.

"Nothing permanent. She was about to throw a very nasty hex my way. Funnily enough, I didn't feel like spending the next fortnight croaking on a lily pad. I just..." He wiggled his fingers. "...made her forget."

"Forget what?"

Chatoya turned to her, her expression somewhere between concern and bewilderment. "Lise...you do know you're talking to thin air?"

"My existence," Alex supplied lightly.

Disbelief seized her. "_What?"_

"There's no one there," Chatoya said in the sort of voice that people used to soothe lunatics. "It was probably just a kid cherry door-knocking."

Alex let the witch finish, then said with great amusement, "If I didn't know what extraordinary power this little feat took, I'd be affronted that anyone could forget me so easily. Let's face it, I really am a legend in my own lifetime."

"Lisa...you look like you're about to hit someone with that," Chatoya said uneasily.

She realised her hands were clenched around the bat; with effort, she lowered it. "Sorry. I just thought it might be Alex."

"I know he's obsessive and creepy in the extreme," Chatoya said wryly, "but surely he's not stupid enough to show up on your doorstep. And I don't think he'd ring the doorbell."

"I'm not creepy!" Alex said with what sounded like genuine indignation. "And ringing the doorbell is _common courtesy_, something your trigger-happy friends seem to have no concept of."

"Tell me the big bad assassin did not just call us trigger-happy," said the cool and very menacing voice of Cougar Redfern. Snow crunched as he appeared over Alex's shoulder with a suddenness that made Lisa glad, blocking out the sunlight. "Personally, I don't believe in guns."

"The NRA will be devastated," Alex said with a roll of his eyes, and half-turned so the open door was at his back. "What do you believe in? Peace on earth and goodwill to all men?"

Cougar gave him a bright, unkind grin. "Peace in my bit of the earth. And my fist."

"Oooh." Alex yawned. "Very scary, cherie. Didn't anyone tell you that fisticuffs are just so _nineties_? Although the first rule of Fight Club is that you don't talk about it, so one can forgive you for such ignorance."

Chatoya's face was a picture of bewilderment. "Guys...what's going on? Who are you talking to?"

All the amusement drained from Cougar; his eyes were gold and hard as coins. "Oh, you did not," he breathed, gaze fixed on Alex. "If you've hurt her..."

"Cougar," she said softly. It was pointless starting a fight he wouldn't win.

"I think you'd better leave," added a new voice. Jepar eased into her view, hands in his pockets, but his shoulders tense. "Lisa's made it quite clear she doesn't want anything to do with you."

"Lisanor is not in possession of all the facts," Alex said shortly. "And I don't think I'm fool enough to leave you in possession of all your faculties."

She felt something – a twist of power, forked and flickering like an adder's tongue. It was barely perceptible, but she knew what he had done because Cougar and Jepar were suddenly emptied of all their hostility. Their eyes slid past Alex as if he were invisible.

"Sorry we're late," Jepar said brightly. "I had to surgically extract Cougar from his bed."

"And then he had to surgically extract his head from my wall," Cougar muttered. "JJ, we need to talk about the way you wake people up. It isn't right."

"But it is funny," Jepar said cheerfully.

"What did he do?" Chatoya said.

Three of the strongest-willed people Lisa knew had turned into Stepford wives before her eyes, and if she wasn't stood there, she would never have believed it.

The vampire's scowl deepened, oblivious to her or to Alex who watched them with a half-smile, admiring his handiwork. "Nothing I want to talk about."

"I call it the Sleeping Beauty technique," Jepar informed them with the air of a scholar announcing a new and exciting theory.

"I call it sexual harassment," Cougar said sulkily. "No one wants to wake up to you whispering your fantasies in their ear."

"I guessed that from the way you screamed."

"Oh..." Chatoya said, and it was obvious she was fighting laughter. "That's just cruel."

Cougar shot her a sidelong glance. "Well, if you want to try it, babe..."

She laughed it off, but Lisa caught the sudden tension in the air. "I'll leave it to the master. Now are you going to darken the doorstep all day, or do you want to come in and start outstaying your welcome?"

The boys brushed past her without so much as a glance, exchanging banter. And she was alone with Alex, nothing dividing them but air. It was not enough.

X – X – X – X – X

The silence in the vaults was absolute. In it, the mere fact of his breath seemed sacrilege. Vaje trod lightly through the glass compartments, full of airtight boxes and carefully pressed pages. It was arranged chronologically, and the era he sought was somewhere in the middle.

At last he came to it. A metal plaque announced his destination: _AD 50-600. _

Below it was a smaller list of subtitles. He scanned down, and found what he needed.

_The remnants of Empire. The Furies in the aftermath. Nightfire ascendant. Alexandros and Lisanor. The Saxon Age of Britain and the Werewolf Kings in Scotland. _

It was still a shock to see her name there. Or rather, to see the name and have a face to match to it: a face so well-known to him that if he closed his eyes he saw her in myriad small details, like pieces of a jigsaw.

This was the puzzle of her: the angle of her glance just before she confounded him once again, the uninhibited sound of her laugh, the length of her legs stretched across a sofa, the sound of her humming while she cooked some culinary delight, and the sound of her curses as she failed to conquer her culinary nemesis: pancakes. Trivia, details, and he missed her.

And now another piece: her name on a plaque, testament to a past he had never guessed at.

He whispered his keyword once more and breathed on the lock; the glass door slid silently open. A timer beeped to warn him he had only a few seconds to enter, and he obeyed. Inside the compartment, like all others, was a wide desk with writing tools, paper, various dictionaries and paperweights.

The shelves were labelled as neatly as the compartments. He went to _Nightfire ascendant_ and scanned the folders until he found those labelled _Alexandros: Origins and History._ A portrait tube lay across the top – curious, he popped it open and spread the canvas on the desk, leaving paperweights on the corners.

Vaje whistled softly.

It was no Genevieve, this rough charcoal drawing with only a few dabs of red to highlight it, but it had captured Alexandros at the height of his power. Look into those eyes and they were familiar: Malefici had that same cold, naked gleam of ambition.

The boyish smile was negated by the sword hanging loose at his side, smeared with red. He was easy in victory, wearing a Centurion's uniform that was dented and worn; armour that had seen battle.

A signature was scratched across the corner. _Dux bellorum. Vera, Roma._

Someone had attached a note. _Alexandros after the battle that won him Nightfire. Believed to be around a hundred years old. Nothing is known of Vera, presumably the artist, though some sources believe her to be synonymous with Neve, a close friend of Alexandros. At this time, he had earned the accolade 'leader of battles'. It remains a compliment among certain sections of the Furies and an insult in others. _

Leader of battles.

That was what Alexandros became. But Vaje was here to find out how he became it.

He sat down at the desk and opened the first folder. Handwritten accounts greeted him in an array of ancient languages. But he knew what he was looking for; call it Hades or Pluto or simply hell, that was where every Fury was born.

In despair, in pain, in hate, in fear, in memory. Alexandros had drunk them all and lived. How much of Hades ran in his blood? What had he gained – and more importantly, what had he lost?

As he sat there in an underworld of glass and paper, Vaje could not help but fear that he knew the answer.

X – X – X – X – X

"How did you...?" Lisa said in a voice dry with fear. He had overwhelmed her friends without breaking a sweat, or that infernal smile.

"They forget so easily," he said quietly. "Even you, Lisanor, even you can be erased. Only for a few minutes, of course, and when they remember, they'll wonder why they saw me and did nothing. I imagine they'll be quite angry – especially that vampire, now there's a boy about to explode from sexual frustration – but they won't be able to do a thing to stop me."

She found her breath short in her throat, as if there was not enough air in the world. "Is that what the Lethe did to you?"

"Among other things."

He had always been able to do it then. "Have you ever...have you ever made me forget?"

Alex looked at her; a long, slow glance full of what might have been sorrow in someone else. "Do you think we would have gone to war if I had?"

"Why didn't you?"

He gave a shrug. "I couldn't."

Of course. "Fate's a bitch, isn't she?" she said with some nastiness. It helped to be angry. Fear retreated. Only heat and need remained, not so different from love in their ferocity.

"Oh yes," he answered, and turned his face away. "Cruel as Hades himself."

"What do you want?" she said.

"Your help."

She gave a short laugh. "And you needed to...to drug my friends for that?"

"One of them tried to turn me into a frog. The other two just wanted to turn me into pate. It would have been messy. My solution was better. No harm done."

The word hung in the air like a vulture.

_Yet_.

"What do you need my help for, then?" she said, careful to keep her grip on the baseball bat tight. She knew how he could move without warning; there was a predator under his skin, regardless of how well he fitted sheep's clothing.

"A drawing," he said. "For...someone who needs it."

"Oh, you came into town to commission a picture from me? I don't think so."

"I came to town to find you," he corrected. "This just...cropped up. It's for someone you might know, actually. A wolf by the name of Felicity."

She felt her blood freeze. Flick. If he knew Flick, that meant he'd been with the Pack, and he might know...

"I know her," she said gruffly, covering her panic. "But she can ask me herself."

"She can ask, but you'll have a hard time drawing it. The subject's dead, you see, and the only likeness she'll be able to give you...well, it's not pretty. Suicide. Summer. Three days before they found her. You get the picture. Can't blame Flick for being haunted by it."

He spread his hands, looking simple, innocent, angelic. The kind of angel who'd kiss you into a daze and then steal your purse. His voice was tantalizing.

"Whereas I..."

"You carry the dead," she said flatly.

His face flickered, as if startled. "Yes."

"Don't you have enough of your own?"

"What's one more?" he said as if it didn't matter. She hated him for that, for his indifference, because he did not care. And she envied him.

"One too many, that's what it is."

"Then do the drawing, and give her something better to remember."

"Fine." She'd thought she might like Flick, if Cern didn't lie between them, disputed territory. It meant she would have a reason to visit the Pack. Maybe this time he'd listen. "Where's my subject?"

He held out a hand. She recoiled.

"No."

"Lisa..." he implored, her name a sigh.

She remembered how she'd hungered for his touch. She'd been an addict, a criminal, a host of unpleasant things just so he would never leave her. Those days weren't so far behind – part of her wanted to tumble into him again, to live a life that was filled with nothing but him. She'd cared nothing for the wreckage they left in their wake as they tore through life like a hurricane. It had been good. Happy.

And lies.

"I know a trap when I see one."

She was afraid he might just ignore her – the space between them was too small. She wanted to divide herself from him with miles, oceans, mountains. Close enough to touch was close enough to deceive.

But he stepped back, something much like disappointment in his eyes. "Think it over. Not everyone should have to carry their dead."

"Like you, you mean?" she said shortly.

He turned away. "Like you," he answered, and the old, familiar tenderness in his voice was sweet as a lullaby. "And Flick. Do the right thing, Lisanor. You were always better at that than me."

Before she could answer, he was out of earshot. Against the great grey sky, he was nothing more than a curl of smoke, ever-smaller, ever-fading. It was a good act.

She watched him leave because she had to be sure he had gone. When he was not even a sliver of shadow on the horizon, she closed the door and let the baseball bat thud onto the ground. Even then, she did not feel safe.

X – X – X – X – X

In the grey day, she was bright and beautiful and forgotten.

It suited her to be all of those things. Each in its place, and in this place it suited her to be forgotten, for now. In Nightfire, she had been content to remain small and unimportant. There, such extravagances as beauty or grace mattered very little. They were tools like any other. In Hades, none of it mattered.

She had lived her life in the shadow of Alexandros. It had been an easy choice; in his shadow meant a breath away, in the heat of his skin, in the circle of his arms and the confidences of his heart.

Until Lisanor.

Such a legendary love, and she had helped to make it so. She had crafted the war into being, shaping it with rumour and misinformation and outright lies. She had played them like pawns, a queen ruling and warring, Britain her board and her endgame Alexandros himself.

It had not worked. But even the shadow of his shadow was better than nothing, until Lisanor was gone.

For years, she had sought Lisanor as assiduously as Alex. With that in mind, she did not abandon the Furies as wholly as he. She kept her contacts, her little birds trilling songs of death and desire. She cultivated patience. She cultivated her hatred with it.

And at last, word came.

The game had begun again. A queen in shadow, she made her move, the first rule of victory bold in her mind.

Know your enemy.

X – X – X – X – X

"So..." Jepar said glumly, "you're telling me he didn't even bother wiping the floor with us?"

"He skipped straight to brainwashing," Lisa said, looking from one aghast face to another.

"I can even remember seeing him there," groaned Cougar. "I walked right past him. That's just embarrassing. There go my tough-guy credentials."

"We can't protect you," Chatoya said, and that stark fact seemed to frighten the three of them more than anything else.

"Is there anything that can?" Jepar said with a touch of desperation. "I mean, he could walk in and kidnap Lisa right now, and we'd probably pack him sandwiches if he asked us to."

"Maybe..." Chatoya was looking thoughtful. "I can't stop him messing with our heads – we didn't even notice anything, and I definitely had my mind shielded. But I could ward the house so he can't come over the threshold. All our houses."

"You can do that?" Lisa asked, feeling brighter. At least if Alex couldn't get in, she had some kind of bargaining chip.

"I can do it. But I need some...bits."

Lisa eyed her. "I get the feeling you don't mean eye of newt and toe of frog."

"Well…in a manner of speaking," Chatoya said carefully. "I need something with Alex's DNA. Toenails, or hair, or blood..."

"At risk of sounding stupid, before we send Lisa out to try and mutilate the guy who can control minds and wants to keep her forever…don't the Furies keep that kind of thing?" Cougar said, glancing at Chatoya.

"No. They-_we_," she corrected herself, "don't keep any relics of our members."

Cougar frowned. "Why not?"

Chatoya said softly, "Think about what they could be used for."

The silence was haunted. So were Cougar's eyes: Lisa knew he was remembering, as they all were, the night when Ryar ap Sangager had been dragged back from death in the name of love. What might people do to the Furies in the name of darker gods?

"I'm going to go ahead and guess that's one of those unwritten rules," Cougar said in a voice that sounded strained.

"Yes."

"So. We need someone who'll break that rule. Let's think about this. Alex used to run Nightfire, and has boundary issues. Who else do we know who runs Nightfire and has boundary issues?"

Chatoya's eyes widened, soft and dark as ferns. "You think Blue...?"

"I think my brother is a manipulative shit who likes causing trouble," Cougar said through gritted teeth. "Why do you think Alex showed up now? Blue wants something from him. We all know what Alex wants. He'll have Alex's DNA, because he likes back-up. And he'll trade it to us. The question is, what for?"

He did not look at Chatoya, but his eyes were gold and distant as the setting sun.

"What could he want from us?" Jepar said, and Lisa kicked him on the ankle too late. He stared at her, then caught on; a flush crept up his face.

"That he doesn't already have?" Cougar said bitterly. "I don't know. But...but..."

He looked at her, and Lisa saw how terribly young he was. The curl of his mouth was vulnerable, his face pale but resolute. She loved him then, knowing he was steeling himself for battle of a subtler sort.

He said, "We'll pay. It's worth the price."

She sent the thought to him on a rush of affection. _So are you._

His smile was tired and sweet and real.

_ You've got a journey to make  
There's your horizon to chase  
So go far beyond where we stand...  
No matter the distance, I'm holding your hand_

X - X - X - X - X

Thanks for reading! Comments adored.  
Ki


	8. Chapter Seven

Apologies for the delay in posting. I have spent the last four weeks buried under large piles of schoolwear while children shrieked, vomited and hurled food all over the floor. Woe. But many thanks to the wonderful people who lifted my spirits - thanks to: **The Cyan Knight, Shang Leopard, Mandy**, **, goblinishelves, dunk the donut, Queen of Slayers, LifeSucksWithoutVamps, Khansa**, **Clairavance, Shelli,** **Hera Night, Yen **and last, but by no means least, the lovely and extremely-aptly-named-for-this-story **Lethe**.

As you can tell, I adore feedback. It makes my day! I welcome all comments and criticism, so fire away! Thank you to my awesome beta-reader, she of much fabulousness, **MorbiDreamscape**. Next part by October 16th, and then something seasonal for Halloween ;)

Hope you enjoy! It's a long one: apologies!

**Long Lost Part Seven**

_Here is the root  
Where I ply my boot  
To kick you off the fence you are still sitting on  
- The Time Has Come, Lily Fraser_

There were no wolves following her through the woods. All the same, Lisa felt like Little Red Riding Hood picking her way through poison berries and shadows as dark as bloodstains upon the ground.

The silence spread out around her in a fine web and she knew just what grotesque thing she would find at its heart.

_All the better to eat you with, my dear..._

They had argued about who would approach Blue. She had won, or lost, depending on how you wanted to see it.

"I'm used to dealing with him," Chatoya had said, and Cougar had only laughed, a dreadful bitter sound that lingered on the air.

"We all know what you're used to, babe," he'd said, and she'd gone as white as milk while the stillness in her eyes opened up like an abyss.

"Company," she whispered.

That one word had the impact of a bullet.

A flash of intention in Cougar's eyes, deadly – he meant to hurt, cruelty his first defence, but Chatoya was faster. Her hands twisted – such a small motion, such a normal one – and fire sputtered to life between them, black and rippling.

"Enough!" Lisa snapped, because she knew where this ended.

Before either of them could do anything more devastating, she insinuated herself between them, only to find herself back-to-back with Jepar.

_I don't know who's scarier, _the shapeshifter muttered. _Beauty or the Beast._

Lisa saw no one she recognised in the witch who played with fire as if she couldn't feel its burn. _Which one's which?_

She felt his nervousness, icy in the back of her head. _Good point._

"Enough," she said again, glad of Jepar's solid presence at her back. "It's a moot point. Neither of you are going to see Blue. It's my problem, and it's me he can bargain with."

"He can hurt you," Chatoya said, but her gaze went right past Lisa.

She inched into the witch's line of sight, forcing her to pay attention. "Maybe. But I'll make it difficult. And he's got no leverage with me. He can't seduce me..." She threw a glance over her shoulder at Cougar, tense and glaring. "...and he can't blackmail me. My secret's out now – what do I have to lose?"

"Everything," Chatoya said, and it sounded like longing in her voice. "You don't know him."

"No," Lisa said quietly, "But I don't love him."

The silence went from merely tense to excruciatingly uncomfortable. Jepar coughed, and said, "Um. I thought we weren't going to talk about the love that really, _really_ dare not speak its name, because that name is Blue Malefici and it's _icky_."

"It is not icky," Chatoya said with tremendous dignity, if a certain lack of perception.

Before Cougar could air his opinion – again – on the subject, Lisa leapt in. "It's...a little icky. But that's not the point – he can't manipulate me as easily. And I may not know him, but I know- I knew a man who did. I'm not going to let Blue manipulate me, but I need something from him. I just have to figure out what he wants from me."

"The same thing he always wants," Cougar said, and it wasn't her he spoke to. "Whatever hurts the most."

Maybe that was true. It didn't matter: Blue Malefici was going to find her harder to hurt than he'd anticipated. He was an amateur compared to Alex. A nasty, ruthless amateur, but one who didn't know half as much about her as he thought.

So she had won. The rest was just procrastination...

X - X - X - X - X

...Which brought her here: Lisa smiled as she stalked out of the trees and into the clearing, because Blue Malefici would want her afraid, and she refused to be.

No gingerbread house this, buried in the wood. She didn't slow as she went past the battered car in the drive, purpose buzzing in her bones with electric intensity.

She rang the doorbell, and she listened until she heard the faint pad of his feet, and-

With an almighty kick, she sent his front door hurtling down the hallway. Unstoppable force met immovable object; wood shrieked and shattered, and Blue emerged like a demon from a cloud of dust and splinters.

There was murder in his eyes.

He hit her with such force it threw them both out into the clearing; gravel spewed across the air as they hit the ground and Lisa grabbed a handful of pebbles to fling in his face. He recoiled – she took the opportunity to put a foot right into his chest and heard his ribs break with a surge of primal joy. But as she scrambled to her feet, he was faster; his punch hit her like a hammer in the gut, and she doubled over in time to catch his knee in her face.

Part of her admired his sheer lack of chivalry. The other part, meanwhile, took the chance to collapse on the ground with an appropriately ladylike moan.

A knife scraped. She opened one eye and saw his foot in front of her, thought _idiot_, then grabbed his kneecap and _twisted_...

He went down, but even with a dislocated knee, found time to whip the knife at her eyes; she swayed back, and snatched at the blade. It sliced across her fingers, but she closed them into a fist, and aimed that at his face.

He caught it, and something swept by her vision like a silver ribbon. Suddenly she found herself frozen. His fingers were clamped like granite around her fist, and the knife rested at her throat.

It was scorn that curled in his smile. "Not good enough," he said.

Her nose ached; he'd probably broken it, and cartilage shifted eerily as she healed. Her stomach was a sore ball, her back stinging from the impact with the gravel, every breath like inhaling nettles, but that was all that hurt, a few breaks of skin and bone to match the hairlines on her heart.

"For what?" she said.

His eyes narrowed. "To win."

And she laughed in his face. She kept laughing even when the knife pricked her skin, because it felt good to see that flash of bemusement in his face. He only knew how to win; he didn't understand that you could win a battle and still find your losses as innumerable and terrible as if you had lost.

And nor could he understand how one could offer up a small victory for the sake of a larger; how she could toss away those pieces of herself which she could afford to lose – her pride, her safety, her secrets. Blue Malefici knew nothing of loss or surrender except that they happened to other people.

"I think you've missed the point," she said in as grave a tone as she could manage, still breathless.

The knife twisted a fraction. Blood oozed down her throat and pooled in the hollow at the base of it. "Then please, enlighten me."

Careful now, she drew up a picture of Chatoya in her mind and held it: Chatoya as she had been facing Alex that first time, determined and fierce and powerful.

She met his eyes as she said, "I came to deliver a message from Chatoya."

His face was still as ice. The pressure at her neck didn't alter, and she wondered if this would work, this wild gamble. She felt the brush of his power, questing and feather-light and settling on the image of Toya.

She whispered, "It's over."

His arm jolted – and she threw her power at his mind like a knife whipping through the air. His shields cracked and broke under the impact; his thoughts were laid bare to her, sharp gleaming things.

_Alexandros..._ she snarled, and a great avalanche of information slewed over her as Blue's unconscious thoughts answered dumbly in those precious seconds while his conscious mind was reeling. She grabbed it and leapt free as he recovered, mind snapping shut like the jaws of a shark.

The furious blast of power that he sent at her would have destroyed her utterly if she hadn't flung up mental shields designed to withstand Alex, but she had no such defences against his fist. He hit her so hard that she flew into the side of his car and felt the bodywork buckle under her.

Lisa hit the ground stunned but alive. Slowly she staggered to her feet, leaning on the car. He was waiting, and power flickered about him like smoke, dark and curling and toxic.

She looked him in the face, and said in as deadpan a voice as she could manage, "Just kidding."

She thought for a moment he'd annihilate her on the spot. But he only watched her, and she saw the anger slowly drain away until he was calm and still and cold once more.

"An interesting exercise," he said finally. "But I'm fairly certain my little counterattack should have left you with about the same IQ as a turnip. And yet you're standing there. Quipping. Not very turnip-like behaviour."

He sounded somewhat rattled.

"Maybe you're losing your touch," Lisa suggested.

"Or maybe you've been to Hades," he said.

Not as rattled as she had thought.

She watched him, this boy who probably loved her friend in some strange and awful way, this Fury, this monster, and she saw in him something she recognised, because she had seen it every day in the mirror. This was what she feared, and what she had feared ever since the day she found a shadowed path and followed it.

They weren't so unalike, she and Blue.

"Yes," she said, and gave up another piece of herself. What was one more? Nothing compared to what she had left to lose, nothing at all.

X - X - X - X - X

Out on the mountains, the air was clear and cold enough that it was like a razor in his throat. Alex hiked on through the worn paths, barely noticing the scenery or the winter scratching at his skin, his head full of Lisa.

She had been afraid to touch him. That hurt. Even when she had been a slave bought at market (_bought on the wings of prophecy, bought to break a heart_), she hadn't feared him. Disliked him. Loathed him, even. And perhaps she had feared the pain he might inflict on her, but never him; she'd never flinched back from him as if he were diseased.

Time had left her almost unmarked, and yet he saw differences. She was gentler, calmer, but her anger was deep and unforgiving. He had thought she might have softened over the years – that perhaps she might have realised why it had come to war. Why he had found her, all those years ago.

Over a thousand years, when he had gone to an oracle with his blood in a cup and his ambition bared in his smile.

X – X – X – X – X

Delphi was nearing its end then. It had prospered for years as the most important shrine in Greece; but Christianity had spread across the world and the Emperor had forbidden it to practice. A hundred years had passed since that decree, yet Delphi existed still, hidden amidst the ruins of its former glory.

Mists hung upon the mountains as he climbed, the sun breaking through in thin golden spears. People parted to let him through, a stern soldier with battle-worn armour and the marks of high rank. If they wondered why such a man was on foot and alone, no one commented.

There were no other petitioners. In its heyday, he would have waited hours. Now it was merely minutes. A priestess scuttled out from one of the dilapidated buildings, eyes wide and fearful.

He inclined his head courteously, and said softly, "The Kindly Ones look kindly upon me," and passed her a flat silver coin.

She paled at the phrase, but took him into a small, decrepit building. He followed a narrow passage down to a cramped room lit only by a pair of torches that coughed out gouts of black smoke. At its end was a long, dark wall that reflected the light in two faint gleams of orange.

The voice was everyone and no one; a crowd of people screamed in it, yet it was inhuman as the gods. "So someone still remembers me. So few come now, so very few. What would you have of me, questioner?"

He swept a bow to the wall. "I am Alexandros of Nightfire."

"You came to me once before."

"Yes," he said. "You helped me then, for a fair price. I have risen high on the back of your advice."

"It was not advice, merely a future of your choosing. Your memories were rich and sweet," it said, and he thought he heard wistfulness in its voice. "They kept the emptiness from me for many days. I felt the sun, and knew life."

Whatever the Oracle was, it had no life but what its petitioners could give it. It fed from memories, nourished by pieces of a life it could never have. Its only sunlight came in glimpses of future or past, its body no more than a phantom.

"I would offer you something better," he said, and drew out his knife. "A libation."

"Blood?" it said, and its voice was shrill and thrilled as a child's.

"Mine," Alex confirmed. "But I need something in exchange. I need to find my soulmate, whoever he or she may be. It is a matter of some importance."

"Done, and done, a thousand times done," whispered the oracle, and giggled. "Pay me my tribute, and I will scour every future until I find them for you."

There was a small hole in the floor. He raised his hand over it, then quickly sliced his palm open. Gritting his teeth against the sting, he opened the wound again and again as it healed. As his blood dripped into the hole, he heard a sizzling sound – there had to be heated coals at its bottom – and the scent of meat rose into the air.

The oracle gasped and whined like a hungry dog. He didn't know how long he squatted there, slicing at his hand to feed it, but finally it said in a voice thick with delirium, "I have had my fill of you, Alexandros of Nightfire. Now have your fill of the future..."

He gazed up at the wall. It shimmered like water, and then an image appeared in its midst: a girl, a young girl with the dark skin of Africa and ropes binding her arms. She was one in a line of people, but she didn't hang her head – she trudged on with her jaw set and her eyes ahead, staring around her.

"Her?" Alex said, astounded, and aghast.

"She is your soulmate. Your future lies in her," slurred the oracle.

"But she's human," he said flatly. "She's a little human nothing. You must be mistaken."

"I do not make mistakes," the oracle said, and giggled again. It was unsettling hearing that odd amalgam of voices – man, woman, child – laughing in chorus. "That is the prerogative of you mortals."

He stared at her, fascinated. She was tall and muscles gleamed on her arms, and he needed her. But…but how could he ever love her? She was human. She was a slave. She was breakable as pottery.

And his soulmate. He had no choice. This was the hand the Fates had dealt him; so be it.

"How can I meet her?" Alex said curtly.

"She will be sold at an auction in two months," the oracle answered. "Pay well, and she is yours, though she will not love you for that."

Alex grimaced. "I don't need a human to love me," he muttered.

"Are you sure?" the oracle said, and began to laugh, a rattling, half-mad sound.

"Positive," Alex muttered, and when it did not stop cackling away in that unnerving manner, he left. After all, what could it say to keep him there? What was one more word? Nothing compared to what he had to gain, nothing at all.

Or so he had thought. Now as he walked through the mountains and tried to forget how Lisa had recoiled from his hand, he wondered just what the oracle had seen, what it had known in those long ago days when he hadn't needed a human to love him.

X - X - X - X - X

When Vaje came out of the archives, the halls were almost empty. Only the night owls were left, peering at paper in the four a.m. fluorescence.

He knew everything about Alexandros that the archives could tell him, and it wasn't enough. And he had uncovered a mystery with it, one contained on the sheets of paper in his hand.

Along the side of the halls were small wooden cabinets, not unlike confessionals except that these had a phone at their side and no hope of salvation in sight. He sank into one and dialled an international number.

It rang a few times, and then a familiar nasal voice said, "Hello?"

"Ross, it's Vaje."

There was a pause, then Ross said, "Chusson? Why are you calling? If there's dragons or an apocalypse involved, I'm not interested. I've still got bruises from the last time you decided to go gung-ho."

"So have I," Vaje said. "Don't worry, I'm not going to disturb your cushy life in England. I've been doing some research and I've uncovered something unusual. I want your opinion."

"England isn't cushy. It's wet and it's crowded and it's full of crazy people who keep telling me I'm pronouncing everything wrong. What do you want to know?"

Ross sounded more lucid than usual, if grumpy. Maybe he was managing to kick his various addictions. If not for the fact he was a meticulous historian and an even more meticulous killer, he'd have been culled long ago. Vaje personally thought he was a raging psychopath, but right about now, fighting fire with fire seemed like the only option.

"I've been researching Alexandros, and the Furies then. And I've found something...weird."

There was interest in his voice. "Fire away."

"I wanted to talk to someone who'd known him. So I went through the list of everyone who'd worked with him or given a testimony."

"Go on."

"They're all dead. Murdered."

"They are," confirmed Ross, sounding more delighted than anyone ought at such clear evidence of mass murder. "Do you know what's even more interesting? The Furies used to go to Hades then – all the way to the Lethe. There were a little over a hundred Furies at the time who'd gone further than the Styx and about fifty who'd gone all the way to the Lethe. The very end of the underworld."

"Yes..." he said cautiously, not sure where this was going.

"And they all died too! Leaving Alexandros as the most powerful man in the Furies by a significant margin. Convenient, eh?"

"You think he did it?"

"Well," Ross said happily, "that's the Stygian Mystery! It seems like the obvious answer, doesn't it?"

He looked down at the sheets in his hands. A long list of names, all crossed out, all with a date of death. It was daunting to think that Alexandros had gone through them just as methodically, that beneath each black line was an equal cut that welled with blood and not ink.

Except...

"There's a name with a question mark."

"Nimue Fairchild," Ross said, drawing out the name with reverence. "She vanished, probably as soon as she saw what was happening."

"Vanished...where?"

Ross chuckled. "Nowhere anyone sane would follow. She was a powerful magic user, you know, and all the stories have her as Merlin's equal. Know why?"

"No."

"It's in her name, Chusson. Fairchild. Half-human, half-Fey. Morgan le Fay's sister – the sane one of the family. She was born before the Fey seceded from this world and in the end, she followed them back into the twilight lands."

"You're sure?" Vaje said sharply.

"Certain," Ross said. "I'd visit myself, but you know what the Fey are like about rules. I'm not very good at rules."

That was something of an understatement. Ross's approach to rule-breaking was much the same as that of a lemming to high, sheer cliffs. He just couldn't stop himself.

"And she knew Alexandros?"

"Knew and hated." A note of suspicion crept into his voice. "Look, Chusson, what's this fascination with Alexandros?"

Vaje hung up. He sat in the cubicle for a long few minutes while the phone shrilled with Ross's curiosity. The struck-out list was slack in his hands; and that one name with its question mark was more important than ever.

Nimue Fairchild. Alive, the last living person who had known Alexandros. The histories could tell him nothing else and certainly not what he needed to know. There was no one else who knew what might be found at the Lethe, no one else who could help.

So he would go to the Fey lands, strange and twilit and distant as the blind moon, and he would live by their rules or die by their will. He would leave the world he knew, and Lisa would just be an echo in the void between, a whisper of dust to dust, a fairy tale in a fairy world.

X - X - X - X - X

While Lisa went to face Blue, the courier arrived with the files on Alex. Jepar had murmured something about research being soothing in the kind of tone people used with slavering Alsatians, and it seemed like he might be right. The only sound was the scrape of pages turning.

Then Cougar said into the busy silence, "This can't be right."

"What?" Chatoya said. The lamia was boggling at the piece of paper he held.

"This," Cougar said, and started reading, sounding slightly stunned. "_Alexandros was a personable creature, and a desirable one. Over one hundred and twenty men and women have testified to sexual encounters with him. _How did he find the time? Between crazies, I haven't even been able to get a damn date – her psycho ex managed to run one of the Furies _and_ give Casanova a run for his money? What was his MO, death by extreme exhaustion?"

"Talk about getting a bang for your buck," Jepar quipped cheerfully.

"First, _ew,_" Chatoya said, giving them both a sharp look. "Second, how is that helpful?"

Cougar managed to look martyred. "I thought we were looking for interesting facts."

"Facts which will help Lisa," she pointed out. "That won't."

"It might. If the Furies are as thorough as you think, there's probably records of all those encounters. And I'll bet Alex had some interesting pillow talk."

She stared at him, eyes narrowed. "That might actually work."

"Of course it'll work, babe," he said with assurance. His mouth curved, just a little smug. "Want to call your flunkies and get the sex files sent over? The truth is in there."

"Very funny," she said. "But this is serious. "

Something glimmered in his eyes, behind the amusement, bitter and heated. "Having a Fury for your soulmate usually is. Good thing you realise it this time."

She caught her breath, hurt - Jepar might not have been there: the room shrank down to the two of them and the cutting edge of those words. They had reached an uneasy truce on the subject of her and Blue, and the dark intricacies of their relationship which were as unfathomable to Chatoya as to everyone else, but moments like this reminded her that Cougar had not forgiven her.

She had chosen the wrong brother. And she chose again, every day, and nothing changed. Love still hurt, and the sun still rose, and his words were true.

Chatoya looked him in the eyes, and part of her understood the cruelty of what she did. There was something so terribly intimate about it, this unending and direct gaze, a closeness and a promise of closeness that would not be. "I've always known. I understand what loving someone like that means."

There, the words were out and raw and suddenly terrible. She wanted to get up and leave, but she didn't.

He did.

The hurried clatter of his steps, the slam of the door, the space so suddenly and conspicuously empty: that was the proof that she had won. It was a pyrrhic victory.

"You all right?" Jepar said gently.

She didn't look at him; she turned her attention back to the papers. "Fine. Let's get on with this."

X - X - X - X - X

Blue looked at her with new interest; she had shifted in his hierarchy, and Lisa wasn't sure she liked it at all. "How intriguing. So for all your protestations, you're one of us."

She didn't want to be part of any 'us' that involved Blue Malefici. That was an 'us' of a particularly horrible sort: dangerous, callous, hideous.

"No. It isn't only the Furies that go to Hades."

He smiled, and his eyes glittered like frost. "Have you lied to yourself so long? We are the only ones who go to Hades and live. We walk its paths alone, and the beasts that chitter and shriek in the dark recoil from us, because we are more terrible and more hungry than they. We are horror in a place that reeks of it – we _belong_, and so we live, and drink down death, and when the sunlight touches us once more, it feels as warm as blood."

She shuddered, and could not stop her memories – the shadows that moved so queerly, sinuous as snakes, the emptiness and the bleakness of those vast stone halls. The bones that huddled in corners, gnawed and abandoned. Desperation drove her there; desperation was what she cupped in her hands as she knelt before the Acheron, what she swallowed down with her pride.

"I am not like you," she said.

"No?" He laughed, and it was a careless sound. "Did you tell yourself that when you slipped the poison into their drink? When you slid the blade between their ribs, when you felt their last breath on your skin, when it felt so _good_, did you tell yourself it was vengeance that warmed you?"

The words hurt her far more than his blows. But she stepped into them, fury driving her. "No. I told myself it was love. I told myself it was justice. I told myself it was for the best, and I was wrong. And one day, I grew up enough to see it. I was never a Fury. One of your thralls, maybe, a fool for love or Alex or those stupid dreams of destiny, but not a Fury. And if it was your heart under my knife, even knowing what I know about you, even knowing that you are a disgrace and an abomination, I would think twice. And I would mourn afterwards. Not for you, but for myself. And that is what makes me different. I know what I lost, and I miss it."

His silence was thoughtful.

"I think I should kill you," he said slowly. "It's unfortunate I am bound not to. I need Alexandros, and he, after all, thinks he needs you. You could be dangerous, _Lisanora_."

Blue said it with the exact same inflection as Alex used to, and her cheeks burned. She had ambushed his memories, and it seemed that he had repaid the favour.

"So could he," she said. "But you know that already, don't you? You've kept something of his. Blood. Saliva. Nails."

He raised an eyebrow. "Nothing quite so revolting. Is that what you want? And what do I get?"

She stepped closer again. His power made her skin crawl, but she had seen Chatoya do the same. It was a small piece of power over him, nearness, because he had spent so long isolating himself. "Alex is more powerful than you."

"For now," he said idly, but she could tell that rankled him.

"If he wanted Nightfire back, he could take it. He could destroy you."

He said nothing.

"I know Alex. And I can help you make him powerless. Give me this, and I'll make sure he doesn't interfere with you or the Furies."

He tilted his head on one side, and his gaze swept her top to toe. "I begin to see where the legends came from," he remarked dryly. "Love or lack of it, you are tenacious."

"Well?" she demanded. "Do we have a deal?"

"Oh no." There was a thread of ice in his voice. "You stole my memories. There should be reparation for that."

Her heart sank. She had hoped it would be enough. "You-"

He overrode her, quite cool. "I'm sure you're familiar with the term 'blood-money'. Consider it literal. I will give you what I have of Alexandros. Make your protective spells. And then when he can no longer dazzle you, you will go and get me a replacement. In blood."

She had no choice. That was obvious. She needed to protect her friends, and herself. And while she didn't want to get any closer to Alex than she had to (something halfway between fear and desire shivered down her back), she had an excuse. Flick. And then it would be over. She could get rid of him once and for all.

"You'll get your blood-money," she said harshly.

His smile was bone-white against the leaden sky. "I always do."

X - X - X - X - X

Shadow to shadow, she pursued her prey through the woods. It seemed to her that rustle of the leaves echoed her name, but she didn't worry that the boy might hear. He was deaf to anything but his grief.

He stopped at last, and he fell to his knees with something like a moan. His back was a long slope, his head bowed in front of the scorched ground. She could see clearly where a fire had been; a blackened ring denoted its edge, and she could smell death in its ashes.

She let him mourn a little, tasting his emotion like a fine wine. When she was sated, when she judged the time was right, she stepped out beside him.

"Cern Akafren," she said, the name strange on her lips.

He looked up; she felt the faint pressure of magic, half-threat and half-shield. His face was wary. "Who are you?"

"My name is Guinevere," she said. "And I have risked everything to find you."

"Have you?" he said curtly. The moonlight made a revenant of him, hollows and grime. "Why should I care?"

"I...I don't expect you to," she said, playing the victim; turning her head to bare the long vulnerable slant of her neck, hands wringing. "But I wanted you to know that you weren't alone."

"I hear that a lot. It's crap, so thanks, but take the therapy session somewhere else."

Time for the piece de resistance. She glanced at him, flash of eyes as soft as smoke, and said in a voice that trembled, "I miss her too."

His eyes widened. But he was cautious still, for which she had to commend him. "Who?"

"Jal." Psychotic bitch. She'd nearly killed Alex, and would have succeeded if not for Merlin and Nimue. "She was...a friend."

"She never mentioned you."

Guinevere looked away, her pose careful; the tears came on command now. She felt only calm purpose as she acted her part to perfection. He could see lies: all her words had to be crafted, skirting that thin line between honesty and fantasy. "No. She wouldn't have remembered. I hoped she would – I was there when we put her into an enchanted sleep and I hoped she'd come to me when she woke, but...but..."

But the spell that Merlin had sunk her into just didn't work that way. He'd thought he had a mind for revenge, but what he had was a dream of romance. There was no other reason he'd bespelled Jallakri ap Ganra to wake only when her soulmate crossed her burial place. As if love would fix it all. As if fate meant anything. Idiot.

"-she forgot it all. Nightfire. What they made her. And that meant she had to forget me too."

She turned away, hands clasped to her face, shoulders shaking with feigned sobs.

"You know about Nightfire," he said, and she heard the first hint of belief.

"Yes. I know what they made of her. They buried a monster in her and loosed her on the world. Some say she chose her fate. I say that she was a fool in love, and unlucky."

Unlucky for everyone else. Nightfire was young in the days when it created such monsters in its name, young indeed to think it could scorn such a girl and expect no consequences. She knew the savagery of love, knew its teeth and claws; she wore her scars with pride, collected her wounds day by day in the surety that one day it would end.

"In that," she added, "we were very alike. It was what drew us together. I knew her, and she knew me."

"How did you meet her?" he said, voice a rasp.

She turned back to him, slowly, eyes brimful of tears. She was quite sure that she made a beautiful tableau, hair swept across one shoulder in waves, as fragile as porcelain. Alex would have appreciated the artistry.

"It was a long time ago. Over a thousand years. I was a girl in a strange land, following a man I loved more than all the world. She had escaped Nightfire and came to hide amidst the Saxons. The Morrigan, they called her, in their human words, and worshipped her as a goddess of slaughter. We met at a war council. The Saxons wanted to buy some peace, but they thought she might encourage more favourable terms."

She called up the memory of Jallakri's laughter, gentle, rather quiet, and she imitated it to perfection. She saw his answering start, and knew she was winning him.

"We met in a lull between talks. She didn't know who I was, and I only knew her legend. We spoke about things – men. War. The weather and the harvest. And somewhere in the middle of it, we found a common purpose. We found one another."

It was what Cern Akafren wanted to hear and so she fed it to him, piece by poisoned piece.

"When the Saxons were routed, I pleaded with the leader of the Britons not to kill her."

Even then Guinevere had seen her use; had seen how she might turn Jallakri upon Lisanor. Events had conspired against her, but at the time it had been a clever plan.

"It was I who suggested we enchant her. I had hoped she would wake one day. I...I thought she might wake changed."

And she had been right. Jallakri had acquired a conscience along with a soulmate. That the wretched woman had allowed herself to be killed – of all the utter foolishness, the _waste_ of such power.

"I wish she was alive," Guienvere said, delivering her line with Oscar-winning conviction.

His chest hitched, and his face was full of grimness as he judged her. She met his eyes, steadfast, knowing that he could see the truth of her words as clearly as if she were glass.

And then he said softly, "She could be."

Guinevere gasped, and felt the burn of triumph in her heart. He was hers. It had begun. "How?"

X - X - X - X - X

The mirror was full-length and nailed onto the wall firmly. Vaje knew because he had checked it. Twice.

The Fey were creatures of illusion, living in the thin grey netherworld between what was and what might be. And as such, the pact they had signed with the Nightworld reflected that. All that was mystery and chicanery was theirs: mirrors and mists and theatres and shadow.

There were other ways into their world, but this was the quickest and the surest. It was also the most likely to kill him, but the other ways needed magic and he had none, nor anyone he trusted to come with him.

The pocketknife flicked open. He gashed his palms quickly and laid them on the mirror. Crimson smeared the surface, and the air stung his cuts as he leaned close and breathed onto the surface, which misted until his reflection was nothing but a formless shape.

He spoke quickly: it had to be complete before the vapour faded. "Through mirror, mist and blood, I call you from the twilight lands. I ask of you one boon and pass myself into your hands."

The mirror shimmered; his blood faded into its surface and the mist spread, as if some great creature had breathed upon the glass. Faintly pink, it swirled in strange patterns that his eyes could not track.

And then it parted like curtains, and a figure appeared. Behind it was nothing but grey, featureless land and a indigo sky that was empty except for a crescent moon that seemed too large, too close.

"It has been a long time since anyone called us," it remarked, and though it had human shape, there was nothing human in its waxy skin or its flat yellow eyes. "You are bold."

"I'm desperate," Vaje said bluntly.

The Fey seemed to like that; it smiled and revealed pointed, shark-like teeth. "There are rules, of course."

"Of course."

"Tell no lies. Cast no spells. Drink nothing. Eat nothing. When the bell tolls, do not dance unless you wish to stop only when your feet are flayed to the bone." His guide licked its lips with a forked tongue. "It is a most amusing sight," it added. "Those are our terms. Do you agree?"

"I agree."

It gave a high-pitched giggle. "Most excellent, most merry! What is your pleasure, traveller?"

"I'm looking for Nimue Fairchild."

Some of its amusement dimmed. "The changeling child. She lives amidst the thorns and the nettles. I will show you the path, but you must find your own way through."

"Sounds fair," Vaje agreed, thinking he would be glad to get rid of his guide.

It stepped back and he saw suddenly that bracelets of hair were looped about its wrists; bracelets with chunks of scalp still clinging to them. "Then enter the twilight lands, traveller, and pray you see the sun again."

It was too late to turn back. Vaje stepped through.

_There is no time left to reason_  
_To tempt you, to beg you, to pull you,__  
To tease you, to please you  
__To talk you into or out of  
The time has come_

X - X - X - X - X

Thanks for reading! Comments would be adored!


	9. Chapter Eight

Apologies for taking so long to update: I am made of fail. Christmas is never a good period for those of us who work in retail; throw in a new job and a squillon rewrites of this chapter (which would just not come right, damnit), and you get this delay.

Enormous thanks to the absolutely brilliant people who reviewed last time - I adored hearing what you thought! I'll be replying over the next couple of days, so bear with me. Thank you to: **The Cyan Knight, Shang Leopard, Devi Lethe, terrorofthehighway****, untilhellfreezesover, Jezebel Montgomery, Hera Night, Queen of Slayers, Clairavance, xox,**** Anterrabae, Khansa****, Teleranaqueen, RebeccaS, 365DaysofAwsomeness **and last but by no means least, the fabulous **oreocookiepup101**.

Feedback is utterly adored. Thank you to 365DaysofAwsomeness for the nudge!

Lyrics from Susan Enan's beautiful 'Bring On The Wonder'.

**Long Lost Part Eight**

_I can't see the stars any more living here  
Lets go to the hills where the outlines are clear_

The minute Vaje stepped into the twilight lands, the cold hit him. The first breath burned in his mouth and throat, and the icy air was heavy as damp cloth on his skin. He resisted the urge to shiver, knowing it would be a sign of weakness.

The path was thick with silver frost. Spiky trees flanked it, dead and black and bare as the sky. Overhead, the crescent moon hung low, its points sharp as the end of a spindle, the only source of light.

Ice crunched as he followed the Fey. He glanced behind, just once. There was no sign of the mirror that he had stepped through; only the path stretching back to the empty horizon.

He could not say how long they walked. Time became immaterial – he was nothing but the fall of his feet, the clouds that puffed from his lips, and the need to go on. He could not stop. He could not go back.

When his guide paused, Vaje nearly stumbled into it. The cutting remark on his lips withered as he glanced up.

The road forked ahead, and the world divided just as the path did.

One side led on into shadow. The other snaked off into a land as green and bright as summer. A long leafy avenue led to what looked like a vast manor, thick with creepers and lurid flowers of every colour. In the distance, he could hear music playing in a jaunty tune. Sunlight hung like a shining curtain at the place where the road split.

"Our Fey Queen lives there," his guide said, stepping onto the sunlit path.

And then he saw that it – she – was unmistakably female. He wondered how he could have thought her sinister when her smile was so welcoming, her hands held out in entreaty.

"The journey is barely half-done, and you must be tired. There is a place for you there if you pay your respects to the Queen. It's been so long since we had a visitor from the other side – the court will rejoice to see you. We will treat you as a prince among men. There is no hospitality like that of the Fey Court."

"Hospitality?"

"Aye," she said. "The tables are always laden with fruit, and our wine is sweet as nectar. The Fey Court is a place of wonder."

The music faded, and he heard bells begin – a great chorus of them, folding one into another until his feet itched to pick up the rhythm. Scents drifted to him on the wind – roasting meat, alcohol – and he felt his hunger then, gnawing at him, felt his tiredness in his bones.

"That is the bell for dinner," she said. "If we leave now, we will be in time for the main course."

He took a step forward. Her smile widened – and he saw the gleam of triangular teeth.

Vaje stopped on the threshold.

"Me, you mean?" he said softly.

The warmth drained from her eyes. "The Queen is waiting," she said.

"I don't doubt it," answered Vaje. "And I'll bet I know what she's waiting for. But I listened better than you thought. Drink nothing. Eat nothing. Don't dance. I think I'll take your advice."

Her lips skinned back in a snarl. "You are a fool."

"Granted. But not such a fool that I'll make myself a toy for the Fey Queen." It was an effort to step back from that sunlit path as the cold ate away at him. "Take me to Nimue."

The sound that burst from the Fey was thin and ragged, an animal's scream. The enchantments it had woven upon him so effortlessly fractured like spring ice, and he saw what had awaited him.

At the road's end, a gleaming palace loomed that seemed made of ice and metal. He saw dark shapes strung upon its turrets - human shapes – and his skin crawled. Before him, the Fey was thin and grey as an axe, fingers twitching as if they itched to wrap around his throat.

"As you wish, traveller," it spat, and gestured him onwards. "But remember that it was you who spurned the Fairy Queen for a nobody. Remember that when the cold reaches your bones. She offered you mercy, and you refused."

"She offered me death. That ain't mercy."

It only laughed in response, as if he'd made a fine joke, and Vaje thought then that there were worse things than the cold.

X - X - X - X - X

Lisa went back through the woods more slowly than she had come. The plastic bag Blue had tossed her was stuffed in her bra: she was taking no chances of it falling out of a pocket.

Everywhere ached. She felt weary from top to toe, and maybe that was why she didn't hear the footsteps behind her.

"Lisa?"

She turned slowly. Cern was stood in the shadows of the trees, wary as any wild thing. She marked the changes in him: so much thinner, except for the knots of muscle in his shoulders. It seemed to her for a moment that she saw another shape behind him – fuzzy, wavering, but then it was gone and she decided it was nothing but a shadow.

"It is you," he said softly, and frowned. "What are you doing here? This is close to Malefici's territory."

His territory, she noted, a wolf's term if ever there was one. "Passing through."

His eyes took in her dishevelled appearance. "Through what, a brick wall? Have you been fighting?"

"I prefer to think of it as winning," she said dryly. "How have you been?"

His stare dropped away from her, a secretive slant that made her uneasy. She had always liked Cern's directness, his easy charm. "Not so bad."

The silence lingered. Last time they had met, the argument had been bitter. She'd asked him to come back: he'd refused. There had been blame and accusations and shouting. She couldn't look at him: shame mixed with the blood-boiling urge to slap him out of his apathy.

So she didn't see him glance over his shoulder, or the small nod he gave.

"I heard you guys have had...interesting times," he said. "No one said they were still happening. Are you in trouble?"

She looked at him, startled. It was the first sign of interest he had shown in any of them since he left. "Nothing I can't handle."

As long as Alex doesn't try to use you against me. You, I can't protect.

"Toya came to visit a while ago." He shuffled his feet. "We had pretty much the same argument you and I did, and I acted like a jerk, which apparently I've been doing a lot, and she gave me a piece of her mind. But she said the wildest things…"

He trailed off, but there was a hint of curiosity – of life – in his eyes.

She quashed her hope. "What things?"

"About Fireblade, and Ryar and Blue trying to bring back the Burning Times or something crazy-"

"Crazy but true."

His eyes widened – some unidentifiable emotion flashed through them like lightning. "Fireblade?"

"The misogynistic bastard himself," she said pleasantly.

"That I can just about stretch to, but Ryar? Ryar's dead."

A shiver chilled her at the memory. "Not anymore. Fireblade brought her back. It was..." She searched for a word that could capture the awe and the dread she had felt. "Unbelievable. In every sense of the word."

"How?"

Lisa had known the question was coming, and felt pity. She met his eyes squarely: she tried hard to find her friend in this haunted boy, because she was sure he was there still. "A magic spell. Fireblade cut off one of his own horns. Toya said that nothing less would have done it, and even then, it drained almost all his power."

His mouth tightened. Lisa expected him to leave then, now that she had disappointed him again, but there was a curious, waiting silence while his eyes were distant.

And then he said, "What happened to the spell?"

She didn't suppose there was any harm in him knowing. Chatoya had been adamant that he couldn't work the spell – _the magic it needs is immense, _she said. _A powerful witch could, a coven, maybe, but the sacrifice it needs...they wouldn't survive. Cern isn't even close to strong enough. _

"Blue took it," she said with a shrug. "It's probably shut in Nightfire's vaults by now, until he feels like the world should end. Again."

His teeth bared at the name. "Figures."

She hesitated, then said in a rush, "Cern...we still miss you."

His face softened: a ghost of his crooked smile appeared. "Lise..."

"I miss you," she said wistfully. "No one else knows how to argue. Cougar just gets annoyed, Jepar gives up as soon as it gets heated and Toya runs Pursang now, so she's all conflicted out."

His smile grew, tentative, but so familiar. "Yeah. Everyone here takes it all so personally. You start throwing words around, eventually someone starts throwing punches. It's not much fun. Look...I don't mind you coming to see me. Just you," he added. "Not the others. And I don't want to discuss – her."

Lisa didn't particularly want to discuss his slaughter-happy soulmate either. "Done."

"Done and won," he said, and she smiled at the old phrase that had always ended their involved debates.

She held out a hand. He looked at her, eyes narrowed, and then with a suddenness that startled her, he crossed the space between them and gave her a hug.

Before she could say anything, he was gone in a blur of shadow.

X - X - X - X - X

Chatoya and Jepar were waiting for her. They looked up as she came in, and the relief in those two sets of green eyes was matching and intense.

"Got it," Lisa told them, and threw the little bag onto the table. "Hair of the dog."

Chatoya was on her feet, headed for the cupboard full of healing supplies. "What did you do, wrestle Blue for it?"

"Pretty much," she said tiredly.

Jepar grinned. "Wow."

The cosy room felt like another world. She sank into a chair with a groan.

Chatoya came bustling over, wet cloth smeared with her salve. "You've got blood all over you," she said tersely. "Your face..."

"He broke my nose."

"I noticed," muttered the witch. She dabbed at the cuts. "Is that gravel?"

"Yes," she admitted. "It got a bit...medieval."

"You're okay though?" Chatoya said, her voice husky. "Blue didn't hurt you."

When she met her eyes, Lisa realised how much that mattered. "Not even close," she said wryly. "I may look like a fragile flower-"

Jepar made a choking noise that might have been laughter or disbelief.

She shot him a look full of mock-indignation. "-as I was saying, a fragile flower of womanhood, but this delicate exterior hides a heart of steel. Besides...my obsessive, psychotic murdering Fury soulmate could totally take yours."

"Let's not play that game," Chatoya said, but she smiled.

Jepar rolled his eyes. "Okay. Apart from being giddy with relief, you're fine. Now what did you bring us?"

Chatoya picked up the bag. She held it up to the light. "Fur. That'll do nicely."

"So you can stop Alexander the Great and Scary from making himself invisible?" Jepar said hopefully.

"Not only that, I should be able to ward all of our houses," Chatoya said. "As long as you don't take off the charms, he can't play any mind-games. It'll take me a little while to make them, but you two can carry on the research while I get to work."

Only then did Lisa notice the papers scattered all over the room, smattered with neon post-it notes. With it, something else infiltrated her thoughts. "Where's Cougar?"

"Sulking," Jepar said, conveying the entire situation in one loaded word and a flick of his eyes at Chatoya.

"Same old," Lisa said, picking up a paper. "Jepar, could you put your incredible tea-making powers to use?"

"I know better than to argue," he said with a martyred sigh, and vanished into the kitchen.

Chaotya threw her a wary look. _Please don't ask,_ it said.

"Tell me about how you Alex-proof us all then," Lisa said, and saw the gratitude in her friend's eyes. "Is that coriander?"

As talk of magic filled the air, it drove away the ghosts of the men who were not there, and she deliberately did not think their names. She left them to their anger and their folly, because what she had here was better – three friends in a room, fighting back.

X - X - X - X - X

The vampire stamped along the streets as if he had a vendetta against them.

The family resemblance was unmistakable; Alex had seen that same scornful mouth on Blue Malefici. Their features were where the similarity ended: Malefici was all control and calculation. This one, the brother, burned with emotion as if it were a disease that consumed him from the bones out.

Alex wandered along behind him, the thread of power almost effortless: _forget_, he whispered, and Cougar Redfern never even realised he was being followed.

There was leverage here. Alex was not so lost to reason that he could not see the echoes of himself in others. That was why he understood what lay between the brothers.

A girl, a very ordinary girl.

Oh, she might have this power or that power, but Alex had seen Chatoya Irkil gleaming in their thoughts, and it wasn't power that drew either of them. Whatever it was – a certain gleam to her smile, something soft and mysterious in her eyes – he could use it to bargain with.

He wouldn't treat Lisa as a prize. He had no such qualms about Chatoya.

Cougar had stopped. The small park was some way from the town centre. It was deserted in the cold day, and maybe that was what the vampire was after. He sat on a bench, pulled out a packet of cigarettes and lit up. His face was grim and pale, obscured only by the clouds of smoke he exhaled.

"You look like there's something on your mind, cher," Alex remarked lightly, shucking off his camouflage. "Anything I can help with?"

Cougar started: ash fluttered to the ground, but he stood slowly, affecting calm. "Actually, yeah. You could go away and stop hassling Lisa."

"I could," Alex acknowledged. "But I won't."

"She doesn't want you," he snapped.

Alex thought of the flicker he has seen in her eyes – that moment before she refused him when her face was unguarded, though she hadn't known it. "Are you sure? There are very few people who haven't wanted me at one time or another."

"So I read, Casanova. But Lisa knows her own mind."

"Does she know mine?"

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"There are things Lisanor never knew about me. I had my secrets. I have them still, but I am tired of them. I would throw them all away for her."

"Uh-huh." Cougar raised his eyebrows; scorn oozed from him. "You ran Nightfire. I know what kind of secrets you have."

"Do you?" Alex said softly, beginning to circle the vampire. "Then you'll know what is to love someone you cannot have. You'll know what it is to break your own heart again and again because you must, cher, because there's no other way."

The vampire turned to follow him, the cherry-red glow of his cigarette the only colour in the bleached landscape. "I know you're a damn liar."

"Sometimes. But not about this. Lisa may hate me, and perhaps I deserve it, if not as much as you may think, but I love her still. I loved her when the winter was cold as death, when she laid a sword to my throat, when she broke a country to try and break me."

He saw her then, as they had met across that final battlefield. She had been beautiful and strong, and wrong about him.

"I could own her if I wanted to," Alex said thoughtfully. "I could dismantle her piece by piece, and leave her nothing but a girl who loves me without question or thought. When I was desperate, I considered it. But that would not have been my Lisanora."

The cigarette dropped from Cougar's fingers; it was no longer the only light of the winter day, because the vampire's eyes were hot with fury. "Do you have any idea how creepy that is?" he sputtered.

"Are you telling me you would not do it, if you could? If it meant Chatoya would be yours and no one else's, yours forever?"

"That's exactly what I'm telling you!" Cougar shouted.

With consummate ease, Alex dipped into the vampire's mind and pulled out an image: a great tumble of black hair, blurring into a dress just as dark and soft. She wasn't dead, but she was a kind of memorial, and so he resurrected Chatoya, who hung in Cougar's mind in such haunting, tender detail.

He threw her memory onto the landscape – she was incongruous in it, a gleaming creation of shadow and wishes, beautiful through Cougar's eyes as Alex knew she was not in reality.

The vampire flinched at the sight of her, but he could not drag his eyes away. His voice was uneven.

"Stop that."

"Are you sure?" Alex said quietly. "This is the smallest piece of my power. Imagine what I could do with more than memory. I'm sure there are things you would have her forget..."

A muscle jumped in his jaw. "I don't need your help. And I won't sell Lisa out for a clever trick."

"I wouldn't want you to. All I want from Lisa is a chance. Do you think she hasn't changed in a thousand years? Well, why can't I change too?"

"Huh. Well, let's think about it. Is it the stalking or the violence or the threats that make me think you are still one weird, intense bastard?"

"I have been nothing but courteous," Alex corrected. "You're the one who's offered me nothing but threats and violence, cher. All I've offered you is your heart's desire."

Colour flared along the vampire's cheeks. "And I've knocked you back. Guess I'm not so different from Lisa."

Alex sighed. "If that's your final word on the subject..."

His answer cracked like a whip on the air.

"It is."

"Then I recommend you keep out of my way. All of you." He let a little power spin out from him; and the image of Chatoya crumpled, blood beading on her throat like a ruby necklace, blooming like poppies on the snow.

Alex let her image fade. Cougar's eyes were fixed on the space where she had been. He did not move.

"I try not to kill unless it's necessary," Alex said into the silence. "Don't make it necessary."

He didn't wait to see the vampire's reaction. He had better things to do.

X - X - X - X - X

"My journey is ended," the Fey announced.

"Here?" Vaje said.

An archway of briars loomed above the path. Tangled as vipers, they stretched as far as he could see, frost glittering on the branches. The distant creak of wood reached him, as if the forest of thorns was merely yawning like a slumbering predator.

The Fey's laughter was gleeful. "I can take you no further. You are on your own now, traveller. You should have taken my Queen's hospitality. It would have been a sweeter end."

"I doubt it."

"Do you?" It reached up and prodded the branches, its voice light and cooing. "Rise up, rise up, my faithful few. Reveal what lies beneath the dew..."

To his astonishment, the creaking intensified; the briars twisted and undulated like a nightmare sea. Pale globes rode the waves, drifting up on the thorns, and he squinted to make them out-

Severed heads.

They hung like baubles from the thorns, lips blue-tinged, their skin mottled and decaying.

"Nimue Fairchild guards herself well," it said, and reached out to stroke one lightly. "The thorns will bleed you dry and spit you out. Man or fey, we are all but flesh under the thorns. I called this one brother once, the Lord of the Weeping Willows. He wept for her, in the end."

It bent and kissed the frost-bitten cheek, and whispered something in its ears.

To Vaje's horror, the severed head blinked, and its lips twisted into a cruel parody of a smile.

"I have told him that when your body is thrown from the barbed way, we will gift it to him that he may walk among us once more."

"That's...that's just plain disturbing, and I say that as someone who knows an inordinate number of psychopaths," Vaje said. "The horrible death was threat enough. Adding the possibility I'll spend eternity shambling round as a disembodied zombie with Mr Frosty stitched onto my damn neck is overkill."

It blinked, apparently puzzled. "Just enough kill, surely?"

It was time to go. Even the thorns had to be less eerie than the Fey, which cupped its brother's head and giggled at its own pun.

He walked quickly, trying not to hear the creaking of the briars. The laughter was soon far behind, but his nerves remained. It seemed the space around him was shrinking, as if the forest was creeping up on him-

He became aware that he was straining to see.

Vaje turned.

The way back was gone. A wall of briars stood in his way. As he watched, they slithered closer, trailing over the rocky ground with the sound of fingernails scraping at rock.

He backed away, and felt the prick of thorns on his calves.

This was not good.

The creaking intensified all around him; in gaps between the briars he saw the pale flash of the severed heads, their eyes fixed upon him.

A briar lashed around his leg, thorns biting deep.

He reacted on instinct, tearing it away, but others crept around his arms and legs, fast as striking snakes. He thrashed in the small space, but the vines piled in on him, relentless. Darts of pain bloomed in his arms and his stomach and his thighs as the thorns sank into his flesh.

But behind the panic, part of him was still a Fury, cool and collected and thinking.

It was a defence system, and a good one. To it, he was only an intruder, and unless he said otherwise it wouldn't know.

"I'm here to see Nimue Fairchild!" he shouted. "My name is Vaje Chusson and I-"

He was choked into silence. Desperate, he shapeshifted; the vines dropped away, long enough for him to change back into human form and gasp in one last lungful of air before the briars surged back over him.

"-I'm not here to hurt you! I want to know about Lisa – Lisanor-"

The last of his air was gone, and the briars tightened like steel about him. He would die here, on the thorns, he supposed, and though he wasn't surprised to be alone, he wished...he wished...

And it seemed to him that he heard a voice among the creaking briars, whispering _what do you wish?_

And it was of her smile that he thought, brighter than the occluded moon; of this woman who was so far away and yet even now too close, pressed to his heart like an old love letter.

_That I had stayed, and told her the truth,_ he thought, and the darkness closed in.

X - X - X - X - X

The air was heavy with magic. Chatoya sat at the centre of a circle marked out with candles and salt and her power, putting together the binding spell.

Lisa thumbed through the piles of research, conferring with Jepar only in whispers. He didn't seem as nervous as she felt, but he had to feel Chatoya burning like a star on his senses, so much more powerful than she had been a year ago.

"Here," Jepar murmured, pushing a piece of paper over to her. "It's in Latin, but Alex's name is there."

She scanned it, and a word caught her eye. "You might have found something," she said. "This is...weird. If it's true, then I don't understand why he..."

Jepar coughed. "Um. Enlighten me?"

She blinked, dragging her attention away from the faded manuscript. "Cougar was right about the pillow-talk," she said slowly. "This is a record from a werewolf Alex had a fling with in Rome. A senator, at that. Listen: _I had heard many strange tales about the Furies, and when I judged him at his gentlest, I asked him if it was true that they went to the underworld. He said it was so, and when I asked him how often he had been there, his answer was a pretty riddle, as he himself is. First, I found despair, he said, then anger, then hate, then fear and after that, I found oblivion and myself with it. But the last time I went to Hades, he found me, and found me worthy."_

"Six times," Jepar said, staring at her. "There's five rivers, right? So if that last bit means what I think it means..."

"He spoke to Hades," she whispered. "He went to the Underworld and he spoke to Hades."

"Hades isn't real..." protested Jepar. "He's a myth, and even if he was real, he's dead now."

"Is he?" she said vaguely, her head spinning. "Are you sure?"

There was a long silence, broken only by Chatoya muttering spells in the background. The greenish glow of her magic cast Jepar in an eldritch light, his eyes huge and hollow.

"No," he said. "Then what does that mean – that Hades found Alex worthy? Worthy of what?"

"I don't know. But we need to find out. And I can only think of one person who'd know."

"Do you think he'll tell you?" Jepar said hesitantly. "You've made your feelings pretty clear. Won't he just be suspicious if you start batting your eyelashes at him?"

"I have a reason to see him," she said slowly. "Alex has an unusual talent. Morgan la Fey..."

She stopped, startled at how easily the name slid from her lips. For a second, she had forgotten Morgan was dead.

"Morgan used to say that he carried the dead," she said in a voice that was rough at the edges. "It was a good description. If you let him in your mind, he can bring them back to life again, in a way. It's only an illusion he creates from your memories – you can't touch them or talk to them, but you can see them if you want. If you let him in."

"Who would?" muttered Jepar.

"Felicity Seraphine. Alex asked me to draw her sister. The only catch is that I have to touch him to see the memory of her. Which is undoubtedly why he offered to help her in the first place."

His eyes were troubled. "I don't think it's a good idea."

"I didn't think you would," she answered. "But what other option have we got?"

"There must be something..." he said.

They both glanced up at the click of the front door: when it slammed shut so hard the pictures of the wall rattled, it was obvious who it was.

Cougar came into the room in a predator's slink, white with fury. The glare he turned on Lisa had the intensity of a volcano about to blow. "You had better have got something that will stop that son of a bitch getting into my head!"

She only gestured to Chatoya. His soft snarl might have been triumph or pain. "What did Alex do?"

"Threatened her," he said, the words a promise of revenge. "And us. He wants you, Lisa, enough to kill."

Jepar swore softly.

Lisa felt cold all over. So it had come to this, as she had known it would. "Then I guess we already know his weakness."

"Lisa, no," Jepar said, pleading.

She looked at him. "We have to find out what Hades did to Alex. I already have the excuse. And if I'm convincing enough, he'll leave you alone. What do I have to lose?"

"You're going after him?" Cougar demanded. At her nod, he put himself in her way. "JJ's right. Wait until we have our talismans, at least-"

"I can't wait," she said. "Alex asked me about people I loved. I thought of all of you."

Cougar looked embarrassed. She ignored him.

"And...I thought of Cern," she said. "Alex is with the Pack. If he's already at the point where he's prepared to start hurting people, Cern's first in line. I can't...I can't..."

Her throat closed over. She turned away and began to gather things into her bag. Art supplies, because it had to be a convincing gambit. Tissues, in case she found a way to get the blood she had promised Blue.

When the knife went in, Cougar drew a sharp breath. "Lise..."

She slung the bag over her shoulder. Both were staring at her as if she had stepped out of another time; she supposed she had, in a way.

"Don't follow me," she said. "Not until Toya has finished the spells. You'll only get hurt."

"This is mad," Jepar protested.

From somewhere, she found the courage to smile: the old, fearless, reckless smile of the woman who'd broken Britain and thrown back Arthur, and who had thought freedom more worthy than love.

"No," she said, voice cool and strong although inside she felt like crumbling. "This is war."

X - X - X - X - X

Vaje opened his eyes, very surprised to be doing so.

The ceiling looked as if it were mud, and the air was hazy with smoke that smelled like incense. Wherever he was, it was an improvement on a cage of thorns, and though his throat ached fiercely, he was in one piece. One slightly punctured piece.

"Careful," a woman's voice said. It had a whispery quality that was somehow familiar. "You may feel a little fragile."

He sat up gingerly, and his vision swam. When it cleared, a hand was offering him a cup. He followed it back to its owner.

Her hair was a careless red tangle, haloed about her head, and he thought for a moment he saw autumn leaves. Everything about her was changeable; he saw the bark of a tree with knots and whorls that resembled features, yet then she was quite clearly a woman of indeterminate age. In her gestures, the same duality: nails or shell-shine, knuckles or conkers, her wrist or stone.

"My name is Nimue," she said, "and you've been looking for me."

Half-fey. He hadn't thought about what that might mean before: now he began to understand.

"Yes," he said in a voice as raspy as hers. "Suddenly I can see why the Furies left you alone."

"Oh, they didn't," she said casually. "There's a few of them hung upon the thorns."

He met her eyes, which were clear, cold and blue as the skies of the world he'd left behind. "And am I going to join them?"

Her smile was lopsided. "That all depends."

"On what?"

She didn't deign to answer. Instead, she raised the cup a little. "Drink this. It'll ease some of your aches."

"Permanently?" he said gruffly. "I was told to eat nothing and drink nothing."

"And keep still thy feet when the bells toll," she completed, "lest you find they toll for thee. I know the rules of the Fey Court. I don't play by them, and I won't play with your life, if you were honest with me. It has been a long time since anyone came to me asking of Lisanor. Why do you ask?"

He took a sip. It burned down his throat, alcohol almost drowning the faint taste of cinnamon. "I was told you knew her."

"As do you," she said, and then she bent to cup his face. Her touch quite unnerved him: she was chill and damp as the ground in winter. "What a strange man you are, fresh from the sunlit lands and burning so bright. She fills your head like poetry, doesn't she?"

The words resonated through him, stinging like salt on raw wounds. "This isn't about me. Lisa asked for my help. I need to know what happens to someone when they drink the Lethe."

Nimue released him: the cold shape of her hands lingered on his face. "Artos has found her then," she said, and closed her eyes as if in regret. "Has it come so soon?"

"A thousand years isn't my idea of soon," Vaje said, but could not help the part of him that agreed with her – that hoped with treacherous persistence.

"A thousand years!" she said with slow astonishment. "Merlin-"

She bit off his name as if it was poison to her.

"I will show you what the Lethe makes of us," she said. "Give me your hands."

"Why are you helping me?" he said, the question slipping from him before he had time to think better of it.

Nimue drew a nail across both his palms with quick accuracy; two thin red lines flared and pain followed. She did the same on her own hands, then pressed them to his. A connection surged between them, one of pure power, and he realised just how much of her strength she had concealed from him.

She was a force of nature: in this twilight world, her power spread out in a great dark cloud that darkened all beneath it. She was the tree split by lightning, a river bursting its banks, and yet a woman all at once.

When she spoke, her voice was the one he had heard on the very cusp of death.

"I will show you that too."

That power crashed down upon him like a storm, and swept the world away and him with it into her memories. Only later, much later, did he realise what the strange anguished sound that rang in his ears was: Nimue Fairchild, weeping like a child in the silence of her mind for all that she could not forget.

X - X - X - X - X

Alex walked through the town, head down. He kept seeing that image of Chatoya Irkil, crumpling in a bloody heap. Only her face transformed into Morgan as he had found her, the gash on her throat echoing her dreamy death-smile.

It hadn't been his fault. He knew that. But he couldn't stop replaying the conversation, wondering if he should have dragged her from that ragged bower despite it all and left her in Nimue's care.

"Do you think you'll be safe from the Saxons here?" he'd demanded. "They have no mercy."

She peered out from her rattailed hair, eyes blue and empty. "Then I won't ask for any." She laughed, the sound delicate as bells. "I've never needed it before."

"Morgan, we are leaving this area," he said slowly and patiently. "You can't stay here. There is no one left to fight. We're regrouping north of here, where the lie of the land favours us."

She reached out to him. He took her dirty fingers in his own, looking for some spark of sanity. But that bright, merry girl he'd first met was long gone: she'd been washed away in a thunderstorm, lightning-mazed and half-drowned. Whatever remained of her was Fey, a creature of another, colder world.

"You are the lie of the land," she whispered. "Lies and lies and lies, all across this land."

"I do what I must," he answered.

"More lies," she hissed. "You're trying to build a kingdom on them. Higher and higher and higher you rise, high as the clouds on your beautiful lies, but it'll all come tumbling down like rain."

"Is that a prophecy?" he said sharply.

She licked her cracked lips. "I can hear the thunder already," she said dreamily. "It's closer than you think."

He would get no sense from her. "So are the Saxons," he said. "Nimue wants you safe-"

"Nimue wants Merlin," she said. "He's all sweetness and lightning, nettles and tides. He'll be great or dead, and she doesn't know which and it's breaking her. She's too afraid to leave him in case he vanishes while she's gone – so afraid she sent you to get me."

He smiled. That was part-truth and part-fantasy, and he doubted Morgan knew which. "In a world of change, Morgan, you are as refreshingly peculiar as ever. Perhaps I should have you on my council."

"You wouldn't heed my advice," she said with unexpected lucidity.

"Try me," he said.

She cocked her head to one side. "A dash of honey and a measure of hemlock and a handful of red berries, and it ends," she said. "Or blood for blood, and death for life, and you'll lose your love so the king sleeps on, and the war will swallow us all." She blinked, and a sly smile curled on her mouth. "But you've made that choice already, haven't you?"

His blood ran cold.

"How do you know that?" he said softly.

She gazed back, teeth bared in a ghastly smile. "The trees heard the sky screaming and I heard the trees. The rivers wept in terror, and I drank it down. I looked at the stars, and they were all fixed on you, and I knew what you had done."

Her fingers dug into his. In her eyes, he saw an echo of that dark hot room where he had lost so much, glimmers of turgid red firelight, of blood on the floor, of the shadows reaching out like wasted hands-

"I felt them die," breathed Morgan la Fey, and she drew him down, down, down to her until her breath was warm and rancid on his face. Her face was bright with glee. "It was beautiful."

He jerked back, and she giggled.

He hated her then, hated her knowing eyes and her little harsh breaths as if she could hardly contain her joy at what he had done, what he had lost.

"Are you going to take me away now?" she said sweetly.

She was huddled in her makeshift nest like a wounded bird of prey: hungry, hooked fingers and bony limbs. And those mad, cruel eyes were intent on every nuance of his expression, waiting for a hint of pain.

"War is coming, Morgan," he said. "If you want to escape it, go to Ratae. But I won't take you."

He turned and he left her there, unable to bear the sight of her.

Morgan did not leave her bolthole. She stayed there, and when the Saxons came, they didn't even think her worth enslaving, filthy creature that she was. They thought her an enemy sorceress, and they slit her throat and left her tossed across her ragtag bower like carrion. Alex found her a month later when he went back, stung by guilt.

Nimue never blamed him. _You tried_, she said, placid. _It was her choice._

Yet part of him knew that he had wanted Morgan to die. He had left her, knowing she could not defend herself. He had left her because he had seen the worst pieces of himself echoed in her eyes, and had been repelled.

He walked through Ryars Valley, trying hard not to recall a small stone room where the smoke burned his eyes and he could hear nothing but Lisa whimpering amidst a bloodied bed...

A hand closed on his arm. "Hey!"

Flick's voice drove away the ghosts. She gave him a tentative smile. "I was shouting at you from across the street. You were miles away."

Years away, he thought, and gave her an effortless smile back. "I was. Sorry."

"You looked upset," she said quietly. If she was afraid of him, she hid it well.

He knew what he should have done then: he'd done it thousand times before with hardly a thought. It would have been so easy, to let a hint of vulnerability seep out, to confide supposed secrets and to manufacture intimacy. A small touch on her hand – pretended fear, sidelong glances, hesitation, a handful of tricks that would win her trust and win him a measure of power.

And Alex didn't know why he didn't. She was no different to the other girls he'd used for their connections or their knowledge: no softer, no harder, except that perhaps her grey eyes never wavered from his, steady as the sky.

All he knew was that he flashed another meaningless smile that glanced off her like sunlight, and said, "Not at all. Just thinking. It's hard work, you know."

"So they tell me." She paused. "Have had you had any luck with the picture?"

"Not yet-"

"But only because we haven't finished discussing the details," cut in a new voice. Disbelief in his heart, Alex turned.

And she was there, a cool smile on her face, head high, beautiful in her calm and her courage.

Lisa had come back to him.

_Bring on the wonder  
Bring on the song  
I pushed you down deep in my soul for too long_

X - X - X - X - X_  
_

Thank you so much for reading! All comments and criticism very much adored.


	10. Chapter Nine

I am so late with this. I suck. Apologies. Long story short, our landlord decided to try and screw us over so we had to move house. But! All merrily moved now and in a shiny new flat which can hold the quite literally hundreds of books I've acquired.

Many, many thanks to the wonderful and endlessly patient people who read and reviewed last time. Thank you **365-Pages-of-Awsomeness, Shang Leopard, takishia**, **Ambrosien,** **QueenOfSlayers**, **Chocolatetree**, **Cianna Greenwood, ess3sandra, oreocookiepup101, Lee Haynes, terrorofthehighway**, **Inspired by a Kiss, Lacrymose, Bella**, **Bais** and last, but by no means least, the brilliant **Juv**

As you can tell, feedback is very much adored. I welcome criticism, so please don't hesitate to tell me what you think. And you can use the shiny new PM system if you don't want to review in public. I hope you enjoy!

**Long Lost Part Nine**

_Even the best fall down sometimes  
Even the stars refuse to shine  
Out of the back you fall in time  
I somehow find you and I collide  
- Collide, Howie Day_

He was the only living man in a world of ghosts. Yet in the midst of Nimue's memories, the ancient rain passed through Vaje as if he was unreal, the dream of days to come.

The thunderstorm crackled overhead. Even lightning could not pierce the grey curtain of rain that obscured everything but the sodden ground a few feet ahead. Beneath it, the longhall looked small and besieged.

The guards either side of the entrance stood to attention, grimly ignoring the water dripping from their helmets. Under its eaves, two people waited. Nimue was unmistakable, her red hair twisted into loops that hung at the nape of her neck. A young man with a handful of gleaming gold rings and a striking black fur cloak was tense as a bowstring beside her.

He squinted into the downpour. "I wonder how the governor's liking his first taste of Britain? Can't be easy for a soft Roman, wading through the mud."

"If you think Aurelianus is soft, Tristan, you need to think again," Nimue said, voice cool. "You might wear a wolf on your shoulders, but he'll wear your skin if you push him."

Tristan shot her a startled look. The cloak and his armour lent him an air of experience that he didn't really have. "I thought that was a rumour."

"Rumours start somewhere. You don't have to like the man, but you need to at least pretend to be civil. Right now, he's all that stands between us and the Saxons."

"We don't need to hide behind the Empire."

There was pity in her eyes. "We can hide or we can die, Tristan. Unless the tribes unite-"

"Under him?" He snorted. "No one will accept a foreigner. They're all the same – slick-talking snakes who want to tax us into submission."

"There speaks your father," she said sharply.

That got to him. There was something between anger and shame in those soft brown eyes. "I'm nothing like that old bigot."

She gave him a long look, top to toe. "No. You aren't. But you did sound uncannily like him."

He grimaced. "You've made your point, Nimue. I'll reserve judgement on our new overlord. For now."

"That will do," she said. And then, to Vaje's surprise, she looked straight at him, and smiled: those star-blue eyes pierced time and illusion. "Tristan had a good heart and a bad upbringing. Don't judge him too harshly."

Vaje cleared his throat. "You can see me."

"These are my memories. This is my world." Her smile faded as if the water had washed it away. "Or it was, once."

X - X - X - X - X

Miles and years away, and far wiser, Lisa stood in front of Alex and offered herself up to him. It was the only bargaining chip she had, and also the only one he wanted.

But she had caught him entirely unawares, of that she was sure. There had been a depth of shock in his black eyes that even he could not feign.

"I wasn't expecting you so soon," he said, a note of query in his voice.

"Consider yourself lucky," she said.

His glance was sudden and heated, lingering like a brand on her heart. "I always have."

"I guess I'll leave you to it," Flick said, sounding confused. She was out of place between them, innocent of all they had done. "Thanks again, Alex."

Unusually, he didn't go through the social niceties. She must really have rattled him. Barely a murmur to Flick, not even glancing in her direction, and they were alone.

His lips parted: he took a breath as if it was his first or his last, and the shadows in his eyes had the heaviness of a summer night.

"Forgive me my suspicion, Lisanor," he said, "but this change of heart seems a little sudden. What do you want?"

"I'll do the picture," she answered. "But I want something from you in exchange."

His smile had a hint of the devil to it. "Tell me it's the endless pleasure of my company."

"It was hardly endless," she said shortly. "More like about ten minutes."

He gave her an unimpressed look. "Time has clearly dulled your memory, cher. You couldn't get enough of me once."

"You know what they say," she parried, taking refuge in words. "Too much of a bad thing-"

"And I can be very, very bad," he purred, stepping closer. She didn't retreat; she knew he respected resilience. But panic tingled in her hands and feet, willing her to move, to run – or worse, to stay, to melt into him, to let it all be easy and careless once more.

"Agreed," she snapped, ignoring both options. "Terrible, in fact."

"Ouch! Enough of this foreplay. What do you want, Lisanor?"

"Leave my friends alone."

"Easily done," he said with a graceful shrug. "I'm not interested in them. Treat me with respect, and I'll happily repay the favour."

She stamped very hard on the thought that she was going to try and steal his blood to hand to Blue Malefici as a trophy, because somehow she didn't think Alex would view that as respect.

"Then we have a deal," she said, and gingerly held out a hand.

He couldn't have guessed the fear that paralysed her. Or maybe he did: he looked at her hand for a long time, his eyes soft and sad. Then he said, "Is that what we have come to, my Lisa? Strangers who shake hands because words are not enough?"

She didn't waver. But she did let a little of the pain creep into her voice. "Too many of your words were lies."

He flinched, as if that had hurt. Maybe it did: but he'd use it to manipulate her all the same.

"Sometimes lies are necessary," he said. "Please. Let's at least not stand in the street like a pair of market traders. I'm giving you a memory to draw. It will take a little while, especially with the complications of a soulmate link. I won't go where I'm not invited, and that will take some...restraint."

She could see the sense of it. "All right. What did you have in mind?"

"Somewhere warm. Comfortable." Intimacy filled his voice. "Private. I'm sure you can find a place."

X - X - X - X - X

Vaje was glad he couldn't feel the insistent rain. It felt as if they had waited an eternity before a shout came: a small, half-drowned boy came sprinting out of the downpour.

He skidded in the mud, and would have gone flying if Tristan hadn't seized him by one scrawny arm.

The boy dropped to one knee, looking up with adoring eyes. "Lord Tristan, they're here. A big party – twelve horses, and a wagonload of goods. He looks like a king, the governor, all in gold!"

"Well done, lad," Tristan said, lifting the boy to his feet. "Go on in, there's food and a fire, and you look like you need both."

The boy threw a cheeky salute to him, and a more respectful one to Nimue, then scuttled inside.

"Gold," muttered Tristan. "What sort of fool wears gold in a country like this? They'll see him coming a mile off, and have an arrow between his eyes before he has time to realise he's worth far more dead than alive."

Nimue coughed delicately. "I thought you were reserving judgement, Tristan?"

His sideways glance was full of chagrin.

Over the mutter of the rain, a new sound emerged: the steady thump of hooves. Vaje turned to find it, and saw them, emerging from the curtains of shimmering rain like shadows that formed into a company of men on horseback.

The leader rode a huge black warhorse and even in the dull light, his armour gleamed like a banked fire. A longsword that must have been as tall as Nimue was in one hand. But the messenger boy had made a mistake.

Alexandros rode behind the man in gold armour, his face bare to the elements. His hair was cut in the style of the legions, and he wore the short sword that marked out the Roman elite. He looked uncannily like that picture Vaje had glimpsed in the archives: there was the same determination in his face, the same cool intelligence.

Others followed after, mostly military men who carried weapons with the ease of practice and use. And last, a cloaked figure almost slumped over their horse.

The gold-armoured man sprang to the ground. He was a giant. Both the guards on the door shifted nervously.

Tristan made a small bow. Nimue stepped forward to stop him, but too late. "Governor, welcome-"

As Alexandros slid lightly off his own horse, Vaje saw a smile glimmer.

The golden giant gave a great bellow of a laugh. When he wrenched off the helmet, it revealed a mass of scars and missing teeth. "A pretty compliment, but you have the wrong man. I'm just his champion."

Tristan inclined his head stiffly. "My apologies."

"None necessary," Alexandros said smoothly, moving to join them. He held out a gloved hand: Tristan clasped it, eyeing him with uncertainty. Vaje could understand that - Alexandros looked barely more than a boy, slight under the weight of cloak and weaponry. "Galahad has been an excellent decoy. How many arrows have you taken for me so far?"

Something unpleasant in Galahad's smile. "Enough to dent my armour."

Alexandros shrugged. "I did warn you that gold is damnably soft. A waste of your winnings." He turned back to Tristan, eyes intent. "Galahad had a most successful career as a gladiator before he joined my service."

Around them, the other men were dismounting, tending to their horses.

"Such a warrior is welcome to our shores," Tristan answered, showing a streak of political savvy Vaje hadn't suspected. "We have need of every sword."

"Aye, I hear the Sais are banging at your door," Galahad remarked. "Well, fear not..." His gaze flicked over Tristan with contempt. "_Lord_ Tristan, is it? The might of Rome is here."

A flush crept up the young man's cheeks. "The might of Rome looks markedly like a dozen men."

Galahad's eyes darkened. He was spoiling for a fight, Vaje realised, as the longsword scraped into the air – Tristan was just as quick, flinging back the black cloak to snatch at the blade on his hip...

"A dozen men of Rome who are worth their weight in gold."

The icy edge in Alexandros's voice cut through the gathering tension: Galahad hesitated.

"Which," he continued, "we happen to have brought with us. At the very least, I will begin by buying peace from the Saxons until our defences are better prepared. Perhaps we might go inside and speak of these urgent matters."

Tristan stepped back. There was a measure of respect in his nod. "Forgive me, Governor. You must be tired. We have room at the hearth for you and your men."

"They will be glad of it, warlord," murmured Alexandros. There was a genuine warmth to his smile that Tristan responded to; his hand moved from his knife, and he gestured the Romans into the hall.

Soon only Nimue and Alexandros were left outside, huddled under the eaves – and one other, that cloaked figure still upon the horse who seemed to be struggling to dismount.

"You defused that well," she remarked. "Gods spare us the pride of men!"

He chuckled. "Let's hope not. I'm relying on that infernal British pride to destroy the country."

"They are to be slaughtered, then," she muttered.

"You sound disapproving," Alexandros said with a sideways glance. "The British are a rabble, Nimue. Wasn't that what you wrote in your report?"

She gazed out on the rain, and her face was thoughtful, as far from the mud and the thunder as the moon from earth. "So they seemed when I first came here. Rowdy, contentious men who love to war. Clinging to their old gods and their old ways, resistant to any order at all. And yet..."

"And yet?" he prompted, gentle. Vaje was surprised at how calm he was, how subtle. This was not the man who had carved his name into legend, who had washed a country bright with blood.

"Their songs stir my blood," she answered, a kind of ferocity in her voice. "They sing of glory and bravery and of endurance, and something in me echoes with their voices. I ride through the countryside, and see how hard they fight for their patchwork pieces of land, how hard they work to bring life from the stones and the soil. I see how loyal they are to those they honour. I see the strength of a vow here, true as fact, strong as iron. I see all this, and I cannot help but love them a little."

He didn't mock her or dismiss her: he merely nodded and said, "I don't think my mind will change, Nimue, but I will think about what you've said, and I will learn for myself."

She took a breath, something like relief in her face. "You know, Alexandros, you might just be good for Nightfire." Her gaze slide past him, to the figure on the horse who was hanging perilously from the beast's side. "Who is that?"

"Who..." He turned, and a frown dented his brow. "Ah. My slave."

"I had no idea you had a taste for owning flesh," she said, a touch of acid in the words.

"Neither did I," he said with a peculiar crooked smile.

She opened her mouth to reply – but as the slave's feet at last reached the ground, they swayed, and crumpled into a limp heap. An exclamation flew from Nimue's lips. She ran over to the prone form, heedless of the rain.

"Are you all right?" she demanded, and then repeated it in half a dozen tongues Vaje couldn't understand. "What's her name?"

She pushed back the hood, and Vaje could not conceal a gasp as he saw her face.

"Lisa," he said softly, as behind him, Alexandros said, "_Lisanora_."

And there was nothing between past and future then: they were two men who were hopelessly connected to this girl who had no idea how extraordinary she would become, how extraordinary she would remain.

He stood in a world full of ghosts, bereft, and wondered who here was truly alive.

X - X - X - X - X

"I didn't have the local library in mind," Alex said, wearing an expression close to disgruntlement as he sat on the creaky leather couch.

"No?" Lisa said sweetly, balancing the sketchpad on her lap. "You can't tell me this doesn't fit the bill."

He glared over at the reading club in the corner, avidly discussing what sounded like a particularly involved Harlequin novel. "Yes, _cher_, just you, me, and a dozen spinsters."

"They won't disturb us." But they were a safety net, if a small one. Her blood was like electricity in her veins, fear and anticipation and resolve. "Let's get this over with."

His lips thinned at her bluntness. Little did he know how she was steeling herself for what she had to do: not because she didn't want to feel the soulmate link again, but because she did.

Like an alcoholic inhaling the fumes of that first drink, she could already imagine it.

Lisa did not look at Alex. In truth, she was afraid of what she might see there – victory, pity, or worst of all, love.

His voice was gentle. "Don't be afraid."

"Too late," she answered.

"I hope not, _Lisanora_," he whispered, and took her hand. The link burned through her like fire. The library disappeared in a bright blaze of sensation, so close to pain, so close to bliss, and she was left with nothing between them but this: the past, and the future.

X - X - X - X - X

"Can you understand me?" Nimue said, patient. She repeated it several times: it took Vaje a few moments to realise her lips were not moving in time with the words. She was translating for him, then.

At last she hit the right language: some of the stupor left Lisa's expression.

"I can understand you," she said in a voice that shook with tiredness.

Vaje had never heard her sound like that: weak, frail, human. And she was human, this Lisa – a shivering, soaked girl with eyes that had none of the affection and depth he was used to. It roused a need to protect her, to whisk her away from this damp dank land and this idiot who clearly didn't want her.

He didn't realise he had knelt down beside Nimue – that he had tried to reach for Lisa and comfort her - until his hands swept through her body feeling nothing more than the moist touch of mist.

"At risk of asking a foolish question," Nimue said dryly, "are you all right?"

Lisa gave a bitter laugh that ended in a long, hacking cough. "All right?" she croaked. "We have ridden for three days in this hellish rain, three days without more than five minutes rest." Her voice broke: she gasped for breath that rattled in her throat.

"Easy," Nimue murmured, helping her to sit, so she could breathe easier. But Vaje could see how Lisa shook in her arms, how many hollows her face had.

He was shocked to see tears stream down her cheeks to mingle with the rain: he'd only seen her cry once, and it had been for him, in a night so desperate he'd thought none of them would live.

"I haven't slept or eaten or even had a drink and I'm so c-cold...I hate this country. I hate this, this empty sky. And I hate _him_." She fought for air, and fought to spit out the words, slow as poison. "I will go to my grave hating him."

"What on earth is wrong with the girl?" Alexandros asked idly.

Vaje could quite cheerfully have hit him.

Nimue glanced up, her voice even colder than her ice-chip eyes. "She is human, Alexandros, that's what's wrong with her, and you seem determined to punish her for it."

"What do you mean?" he demanded, eyes wide.

"How long have you travelled for?"

"Three days. I wished to be here as promptly as possible."

"And did you bother to stop in all that time?"

He looked amazed. "Of course not. The country is on the brink of war. We have all been travelling just as hard as she has, Nimue, and you do not see me crumpling on the ground."

"Did you stop to hunt?"

He shrugged. "My men and I hunted along the way. There's plenty of game in the fields."

"And what did you give Lisa to eat?"

His mouth opened and closed as comprehension dawned on him. "Oh," he said quietly.

"And did anyone bother to think that she is not immune to colds or lung-rot?"

Alexandros looked positively mortified. "I haven't kept a human before," he said in almost meekly.

"Or that she might need to sleep at some point?" Nimue said, sweet as cyanide.

A flush stained his face, and to Vaje's surprise, he knelt down in the mud beside them, his eyes full of regret. "I have treated you badly, _Lisanora_," he said, and brushed her face gently with a gloved finger. "Forgive me."

Nimue translated and Lisa's eyes widened, glazed with fever and surprise.

"Gallantry is all very well," Nimue remarked, " but this rain is doing her no good."

Alexandros was gazing at Lisa with a strange expression – as if seeing in her something new and unexpected. Vaje felt a shaft of jealousy spear right through him. It hurt: it hurt to think that she would love Alexandros, even if he knew that she would leave him eventually.

He said absently, "You're right, Nimue, as you usually are."

And then he leant forward and carefully gathered Lisa in his arms. She let him, though her face was confused, and a little afraid. He stood and then he carried her out of the rain like a bride.

"He knew, even then, what she was to him." Nimue followed them but her voice drifted over the rain. "And I think that was the first time he realised how easily he might lose her."

The scene shifted: Alexandros was laying Lisa down carefully on a heap of rugs, peeling away the waterlogged cloak. The fire in the room was banked and burning merrily: candles lit the corners to drive away the darkness. The rumble of voices was distant, and the domesticity of it seemed far removed from the dangerous world of war and politics.

Nimue watched from the door, a bag in her hands that smelt of herbs and spices.

He was careful not to let their skin touch, Vaje noted with some puzzlement. Alexandros piled furs and blankets around her until she was cocooned. His face was intent, almost tender. Lisa watched him with wary eyes, shivering even under all the layers. Neither spoke, but the silence was charged.

At last, Nimue gave a sigh and went in.

A mask slid over Alexandros's face so smoothly it spoke of practice. He was the Governor again, come to rule and ruin Britain.

"Will she live?" he said as the Fey woman peered in Lisa's eyes and felt her forehead, her skin, listened to her heart.

Nimue made him wait. She dug out some herbs and ground them into paste, throwing in berries and a pinch of a dark powder. Nothing but the sound of pestle in mortar disturbed the air.

"Probably," she said finally.

Until he relaxed, Vaje wasn't aware how tense Alexandros had been. A dangerous man indeed.

"I'd like you to spend some time with her," he said, back to business.

"Given your tender treatment of her, that's inevitable," Nimue retorted. "She'll need infusions for some days yet. Not to mention a decent meal or two."

"Beyond your professional duties," he said, with a hint of sharpness which made her glance up. "I'd like you to spend some time teaching her our language. And the local dialects, of course. She'll need both."

"With pleasure," Nimue said. "Perhaps then you will hear her voice."

The atmosphere became palpably colder. Something dark stirred in Alexandros's eyes: Vaje felt the roll of power, immeasurable as the sea. Nimue paled, but held her head high.

"I have admitted my mistake," he said, voice level and controlled. "But I will not be goaded by you, Nimue Half-Human. If you do not like this world, there is another I could send you to, far colder, far less accepting of your kind."

She looked down. Lisa watched both curiously, but did not seem to understand.

"I spoke in haste," Nimue said. "I ask your pardon."

The power faded. Whatever lay behind Alexandros's black eyes sank back into obscurity, leaving him a young man who looked weary, hardly worthy of the titles heaped upon him. "Granted. Take better care of her than I have."

He left without looking back.

X - X - X - X - X

Lisa shuddered under the impact of the soulmate link. She had heard so many people describe it as soft, gentle, magical. It was none of those things, only a magnetism so strong that it was woven into her blood, her bones, her very soul. She could not more resist it than she could shed her skin.

It ran through her like molten lava: she was not sure if it was pain or a kind of ecstasy. Then the brightness and the heat vanished, and there was only Alex.

She could hear his heartbeat as if it was next to hers. She felt his breath as if it filled her lungs, and where his hand was on hers, there seemed little difference between them.

But to her surprise, he was holding back, holding them apart.

His voice came through the link, smoky, low, ironic. _I promised I would not go where I was not invited._

_You promised a good many things, Alex. _

Hurt: black, spiky, crawling through him like brambles. _And most, I kept. I broke one promise, Lisanora, one. _

_ The most important one_, she said quietly.

_I..._ She felt emotion, piling up against his shields with relentless intensity. _You're right_, he said. _At least help me keep a less important promise. For Flick._

_ Show me,_ she said.

The library came back into focus. It seemed so ordinary, a world unaware of the connection that pulsed between them. The chatter of the book group was mere background.

She formed in front of them: a teenage girl with long dark hair pulled into plaits and a smile full of innocence. There were echoes of Flick in her grey eyes and her blunt bone structure.

Lisa pulled the silver knife from her bag. His eyebrows raised – but it was small, and when she used it to shave a pencil to a fine point, Alex's suspicion vanished. She set it down beside her. It felt comforting to have a weapon, even knowing he could probably wrest it from her anytime he chose.

She began to sketch, grabbing every detail she could.

Meanwhile, she could feel Alex – the press of his fingers light and maddening, emotion surging between them. He was keeping his word, keeping them separate.

And while she was grateful, she didn't know why.

It was to his advantage to let the soulmate link drown her, to let her remember how good it had been – how good they had been. Surely this had all been a ruse to get close to her.

And still he held back.

The picture grew – she added light and shadow, tried to capture exactly the curve of her smile, tried to bring back the dead in the only way she could. Her misgivings grew with it. She tried to figure out the trap, the grand finale.

She kept her tone light and cool. "Who was she?"

"Flick's sister. Her name was Karen." There was regret in his voice that she didn't understand.

"You sound like you know her."

Silence spun out while that shadow of a pretty girl smiled as if death was light years away, never to touch her.

Lisa glanced over, and saw his face was pensive. "I know what she'll look like in a year," he said quietly, "when Flick will figure out where she's gone, and find the car by the lake. I know what she'll become. What they all become, these people I carry."

The link quivered: his eyes were dark as pitch, and full of what might have been pain.

"I've tried to forget them," he said. "But I can't."

Images appeared either side of Karen and her starlight smile: Merlin, face full of dislike – Tristan, arms flung out, face astonished, falling-

"They're always there," he said. "They never leave me."

They vanished.

He took a deep breath. His nails dug into her skin.

She thought his grief was genuine. And that was bewildering. Part of her wanted to be gentle, because she'd loved him once. Another part knew that he would only use her kindness as a lever later. That part remembered why she had ceased to love him.

"Is that what Hades did to you?" she said.

"That's the smallest part of what he did," he said, voice rough.

Her heart went cold. He had met Hades then – he had admitted it, and she had to distract him before he realised, before all this emotion drained away and left him clear-minded and calculating.

"I miss them too," she said. "I wish...I wish it had been different."

For all that she had gained – her friends, her education, her strength – she had lost something too. She knew he could feel her sincerity. There would never be a better moment.

"And...maybe it could be," she said.

He stared at her. His eyes were heavy and soft as smoke. "What do you mean?"

"I promised you a second chance, a long time ago." It frightened her, saying these words. She let him feel that too. A lie wrapped up in the truth was far more convincing than the lie alone. "Here's your chance. Take it."

His face didn't shift: the link was potent with emotion that was barely held back.

"You'll have to forgive me if I'm a little sceptical," he remarked.

"I can understand that," she said. "I guess...this was a test. To see if you'd changed. If you regretted any of it."

"Most of it," he said softly. "But I can't believe you'd forgive me so easily. After so much blood."

"I haven't forgiven you," she said. "But maybe I will. Only maybe. That's all I can offer you, but..." and then she saw her opportunity. He had said it himself. "I'll give you a chance. I'll swear it in blood." She gave a careless laugh, one that did not hide her nerves. All the more convincing. "After all, what's a bit more?"

She saw the belief crystallise in his eyes. He was a Fury to the bone. He understood blood, he understood sacrifice.

Lisa picked up the silver knife. Carefully, avoiding the sketch, she sliced open her palm, then offered it to him. He used it quickly, grimacing – blood welled across the hand he held out to her.

"A second chance," Alex said.

"I promise," she said, and took his hand.

The shields between them fractured like glass. He hadn't expected her to do it. His shock was immense: thoughts and memories and a tidal wave of emotions crashed over her...

How tirelessly he had looked for her. The anger, the shame, the self-loathing when she had left and that nagging little voice saying _you should have told her_. Saying _he tried to take her from me! _Saying _it wasn't worth it, not for the world, it wasn't worth it._

He was haunted by all the memories that came back in the dark empty night to nip at him like rats. The way that she laughed, and the light it brought into her eyes. The times that her eyes met his through crowds, secretive and full of possibility. The fearless way that she walked through armed men, sure of his ability to protect her.

Lisa was stunned. She had never expected he could feel such devotion: she had never known how much pride he took in all those tiny moments with her. Nor had she imagined could be intrigued by such tiny details – the way she did her hair, the softness of her lips.

And it was very hard, then, battered by need and his desire and that torrent of memories, to forget everything that she had loved about him.

His arms found their way around her, and she was unsure if it was memory or reality. She was in a library and in the villa in Aquae Sulis. She wore denim and satin, she wore undyed linen.

She loved him. She loved him not.

Lisa couldn't even admit to herself whether she meant this embrace, or if it was just feigning to keep her friends safe a little longer, long enough.

Either way, when he kissed her, it was soft slow shivery astonishing...

And there was rain in her hair, sun on her back, years dissolving under the pressure of that kiss.

Alex drew back: heat burned in her cheeks and on her mouth. His smile was dazed, charming.

He said, "_Lisanora…"_

She blinked, and her head cleared. She didn't know whether to congratulate herself on her acting, or curse herself for her folly. Then she remembered why she had done it in the first place.

"You're bleeding," she said. "I'm sorry – the knife must have had some silver in."

He blinked, and looked at his hand as if he had only just noticed it. "It's nothing."

She dug in her bag and pulled out the tissues, crumpled. "Here."

"I didn't know you cared," he said, and his smile widened. "Until now."

"Neither did I," she muttered. Her nerves felt frazzled. It was too much. It wasn't enough.

He tossed the bloodstained tissues into a bin. A thin red line crossed his palm, slicing his lifeline in two. He carefully put some space between them: he could probably feel her conflict.

"A second chance, then," he said.

She couldn't say anything. The remains of his kiss were tingling on her mouth, and she was afraid of the words that it might have inspired.

He stood. His eyes were black and glittering, a flush high on his cheeks. "Meet me tomorrow night. Please."

She had promised. Lisa nodded. The hope that gleamed in his smile stung her with doubt. She had changed – what if he had, too? What if he was no longer the man who had sold his blood for power?

When he was gone, the library felt too small, too confined. She fled it gratefully, but not before she had picked the tissues from the bin, ready to betray him, because he had taught her so well.

And even knowing what he had done, no longer sure if she wanted to.

_Even the best fall down sometimes  
Even the wrong words seem to rhyme  
Out of the doubt that fills my mind  
I somehow find you and I collide_

X - X - X - X - X_  
_

Many thanks for reading! I would absolutely adore hearing what you thought.


	11. Chapter Ten

Evening all. Um, long break, and subsequently long part to come. Suffice to say the last six months have been very busy, including but not limited to a bit of credit card fraud and a sick better half. Nonetheless, I am embarrassed and very sorry for the length of time this has taken. Please bear with me while I answer reviews!

Many thanks to my wonderful and patient reviewers – thank you **365 Pages of Awsomeness., untilhellfreezesover, Shang Leopard, goblinishelves, chocolatetree**, **Sephy,** **Juv**, **Ambrosien, terrorofthehighway**, **Queen of Slayers, Dulce Ambrosia, oreocookiepup101, Pandora's Present, Mandy**, **Finding Limbo, AnimeLover1215, twiligt crazy micky, Elentiriel **and finally, fantastically, **ihateee.** Thank you so much!

Lyrics from 'Girl With One Eye' by Florence and the Machines. Feedback & criticism loved!

**Long Lost Part Ten**

_I took a knife and cut out her eye  
I took it home and watched it wither and die  
Well, she's lucky I didn't slip her a smile_  
_That's why she sleeps with one eye open  
That's the price she paid..._

It was just before dawn by the time Lisa reached Blue's house. The woods were a different place in darkness; the wind over the leaves seemed a slow-stirring sea of shadows, a world of anything and nothing.

What was left of his front door clung to the doorframe in splinters. The lights were on in the windows either side, giving the house the appearance of a predator waiting slack-jawed for its prey.

She could have waited until later. But after a sleepless night, she'd finally given up and decided to rid herself of Alex's blood. Her dislike of owing Blue outweighed any niggles she had about things that went bump in the night.

Lisa went in, soft-footed. The hall was still littered with debris, air permeated by the scent of sawdust.

A door swung open, throwing a rectangle of light over her. Lisa froze.

Aspen Martin's expression of astonishment was almost comical. "You're not Therese," he said in an accusatory tone. "Are you trying to burgle Blue?"

Brazening it out was probably the way forward. "Does he have anything worth taking?"

His mouth twitched into an almost-smile, but did not erase his suspicion. "Depends on your point of view, I guess."

A bony bundle of nerves, the vampire was the closest thing Blue had to a friend. The fact that he was a raging psychotic was probably not coincidence. Chatoya kept trying to tell her that since he'd found his soulmate, Aspen was a reformed character.

The wooden knife in his hand did not support this theory.

"I'm not interested in taking anything," she said in her most soothing voice. "In fact, I'm here to give him something. And unfortunately, it's not the nasty end he deserves."

"Huh. Then why were you sneaking around?"

She shrugged. "I didn't think the buzzer would work. And it's not as if there's a door to knock on."

Aspen cocked his head. "Yeah, I heard you and Blue tangled. But you look pretty healthy." His gaze sharpened, more astute than she liked. "Must be something he wants from you."

"You're correct."

Blue's voice, icy and precise, made them both start.

She half-turned before realising it would expose her back to Aspen and that wicked knife; Lisa settled for edging back against the wall, trying to keep them both in her eyeline.

Blue sauntered towards her, threat in every fluid movement. The narrow hall seemed a cage suddenly; she was pinned between a pair of mercenaries and unarmed.

"If this is a surprise party, the guestlist is somewhat lacking," Blue remarked, contempt ringing on every word. "Martin, what's important enough to drag you from your life of domestic bliss?"

She glanced at Aspen. So he'd dropped in too.

And he looked cagey, scraping fingers through the three blond streaks in his hair. "Um. I heard a bit of news I thought you should know." His eyes slid over to Lisa, and he said hesitantly, "You might want to hear it too."

Blue's eyes narrowed. "So it's to do with my vexatious soulmate or Chusson."

Panic fluttered against her ribs. Chatoya was at home. It had to be Vaje. "What's happened?" she said, throat suddenly raw.

Aspen scuffed a foot on the floor. "Vaje's kind of gone to the twilight lands."

"What are they?" she demanded. _The twilight lands_. The name sent an involuntary spasm of fear through her, as if she had once known the answer.

"Which way?" Blue said, ignoring her. "Through the stones or through the looking glass?"

"A mirror, apparently," Aspen muttered. He didn't look too happy. "I don't know why. Ross was pretty vague about it all."

She stepped between them, worry a knot in her chest: she stared down Blue, not even realising that she had dismissed Aspen as the lesser danger. "Where is he? What are the twilight lands?"

His eyes were full of malice, scrutinising her, watching her hurt. "Classified."

She didn't even realise she'd raised her arm to punch him until Aspen caught her wrist.

_Don't,_ he warned, surprisingly gentle. _It won't end well. Chatoya will kill me if I let Blue mess you up._

He let go before she could reply, but the mere fact Aspen Martin was acting more sensibly was shock enough to stay her hand. A few deep breaths gave her time enough to control her emotions.

"All right," she told Blue, deliberately gentle. "It doesn't matter. I'll just ask Toya."

She had him, surely.

But Blue only gave a one-shouldered shrug and said, "As you will."

He was going to make her wait. She knew hatred then, felt it hot in her bones. If she had been younger, human still, she would have flown at him and damn the consequences.

But she couldn't afford to lose her temper. She didn't want him to decide Alex would make a useful ally. One of them, she could fend off. The combination of Blue and Alex, two leaders of Nighfire, two men with more ambition than heart, would be deadly.

Lisa wrenched out the plastic bag from her pocket and flung it at him. He caught it deftly and held it up to the light. Alex's blood was dark on the tissue, and probably worth more than the building they stood in.

"Take your pound of flesh," she said bitterly.

Then she turned and fled his house, because she had to know what lay in the twilight lands, what it was that made her skin crawl at the thought of those three words.

Vaje, Lisa thought, and his name echoed through her with the force of thunder. Vaje, what have you done?

X - X - X - X - X

The past whirled about them like autumn leaves, a tumble of bright colour. Vaje could catch only glimpses, but even they were enough to awaken unease in his heart.

He saw battle plans made in dark rooms. Witches chanted spells on a hill heavy with mist. Alexandros stood in gleaming gold armour, blood flecking the metal. In a fortress by the sea, a woman in a white dress fell upon a knife and crumpled like paper.

"He didn't love Lisanor, not at first." Nimue sighed, her face wistful. "But she was important. He never told me why, and in time, I grew tired of asking. Then – eventually – something changed."

Lisa served drinks to grim-faced men who never set down their weapons. Battle scythed through Britain like a hurricane, a great unending clash of warriors and horses and metal.

And in a narrow corridor, Alexandros kissed Lisa with a tenderness that was painful to see. When they parted, she only looked at him for a long time, and then she smiled, a sweet fresh smile that had the innocence of youth, of a heart new to love and all its intricacies.

Vaje could not look at them for long. It hurt.

"What?" he asked gruffly.

"I wish I could tell you," Nimue said. "But I'm not sure. Alexandros was always good at keeping his secrets close to his heart. And the more she loved him, the more Lisa became as sly as he was. He changed her, and not for the better, though she refused to see it." A smile touched her mouth. "I can hardly blame her. We're all fools in love."

It was a cold truth, a bitter one.

Nimue took a ragged breath that seemed like it might tear her apart. "I lived in the sunlit lands too, and I loved someone when I knew it madness. Oh, the things I did for him. And the things he did to me."

The landscape shifted. It was a wild evening, the trees bent over like old men under the force of the gale. And he came walking out of it as if the weather couldn't touch him, a young man with a quarterstaff, whistling an eerie tune that carried above the howling of the wind. The gale did not lift the black braid of his hair, strangely. He wore a crown of holly, and a wry smile tipped up his mouth.

"Merlin," she whispered, and the name sizzled on her lips. "He came from the far north, past Hadrian's Wall. He was the missing piece, though none of us knew it at the time. All the players were gathered: Artos and Lisanor, Galahad and Tristan and Guinevere...and Merlin."

Vaje could feel the power that lay on the young man as easily as his skin. It didn't show in his Saxon-blue eyes or his saunter, but he was a bonfire to supernatural senses.

"And you," he remarked.

"I suppose so," she said, and her eyes were sad. "If it wasn't for me..."

She turned away from Merlin, who walked on as if he knew neither fear nor fatigue nor finality.

"He'd seen the rise of Artos, and he'd come to play his part," she said in a voice scraped raw. "As you must."

It took a moment before the words registered.

Vaje stared at her. "What?"

"You wondered why I offered my help." She gave him a small, crooked smile. It was terribly human, as she was then. "And the truth is strange, very strange, but simple."

The stormy night was pierced by lightning; when the afterimage of it had faded, he found himself in a small room which had the look of a bedroom. A narrow desk in one corner held the only source of light: a candle that burned with a pale blue flame. Nimue was bent over a scroll, quill scratching.

She wore a long gown that was filmy and pale, and her hair was black beneath the icy light. Elaborate traceries of silver showed on her skin, and seemed to move under the light.

Nimue looked every the faerie sorceress, only splotches of ink on her slender hands betraying a hint of normality.

A knock came at the door moments before it opened and a man strode in, rain aglitter on his cloak and boots, the night a swirl of gusting wind and rain behind him. He drew down his hood: Alexandros.

"Governor," Nimue said, rising to sketch a perfunctory curtsy.

"No need for the act, Nimue," he said, waving away her formality. "I'm alone. No one knows I'm here."

"Then you're a fool. The Saxons are only a few miles away and if they catch you-"

He bared his teeth, feral, carefree, fearless. "If they catch me, they will find out why Rome worships the Furies as gods."

"That's exactly what I'm afraid of," she said softly. "We have both have seen what happens when humans make idols of us. Morgan paid dearly for it."

His ferocity faded away. There was sympathy in his eyes as Alexandros said, "They will not catch me, Nimue. I may be young, but I lead Nightfire by more than brute force."

Her lips turned up. "And I am glad of it. How can I help, Alexandros?"

"There is faerie magic over Stonehenge. Too far out for most to sense it, but it is like a shadow on my thoughts." His voice was bleak. "The last thing I need is the Fey interfering in my work here. I would send someone else, but..."

"If it is the Fey, you will not see your emissary again," she finished, and her smile gleamed like breaking ice. "Unless, of course, she was half-Fey herself, in which case they might merely torture her a little before sending her back to you."

It seemed something close to pain swirled black in his eyes. "Do not think I ask lightly."

She laughed, and the sound had the echo of faerie bells in it, sweet and high and seductive. "You don't ask at all, Alexandros, though you're clever enough to make it seem like a choice. I'll go. And if I should find Fey, what would you have me do?"

"Live," he commanded, and his face was stern and cold. "Live, and keep them from Britain any way you can."

"They will want blood."

"Tell them I will give them blood enough for a century if they will have a little patience," he said. "War will come. There will be plenty of suffering to feed them then."

She touched her fingers to her heart, and bowed. Vaje recognised the gesture from the archives: she had sworn blood oath to Alexandros, sworn to obey him unto death if necessary. No wonder she had not refused his request. She could not.

"As you will," she murmured. "Best return to Aquae Sulis, Alexandros. It will be dawn soon, and I hear Tristan is displeased with your battle plan."

"You hear entirely too much for a woman in the middle of nowhere," he remarked, but he returned the gesture: fingers to his heart, and then – to Vaje's surprise – he added, "Thank you, Nimue."

The door banged on his absence: the walls dissolved, leaving only a night suffocated by clouds and relentless rain. In the flash of lightning, the landscape was revealed – vast and bare, except for the ring of stones that towered in front of her like a circle of arches. Dark and shining, the stones were several times her height. She looked like a child before them.

Nimue was drenched by then, but it did not seem to bother her. She went barefoot through the storm, unarmed, but unhesitating.

Lightning stuck again: this time, down onto the tallest archway. Once, twice – and at the third blinding flash, the space between the stones flared gold, and a great high sheet of fire rippled there.

And then a shape appeared – a silhouette, a man who walked through the flames as if they were nothing but an ordinary door. The moment he was through, the flames fell into a thin line of red that simmered low, and vanished.

"As I said," Nimue remarked beside him. "Strange, but simple."

Vaje squinted at the figure, bemused, as his night vision recovered. As it came into focus, he felt a cold wave of shock. Because he knew that man, that face.

He saw it every morning in the mirror. It was him.

"Wait! Hey, wait!" Footsteps rattling behind her like a machine gun – and the voice, breathy and anxious, was familiar. Aspen.

Lisa whipped around. "What do you want?"

They had never got on. What little contact they'd had, at school, in town, had been fractious, mostly because he was a jerk. Before he'd met Tam Slone, Aspen had been a living incarnation of chaos theory. Even now he was still unpredictable and touchy.

But he looked very meek in the dim light, hands held out as if to show he was harmless. "The twilight lands," he said in a great rush. "They're Fey territory. The faeries seceded from the Night World centuries ago because they were being hunted by humans. That's where Vaje's gone."

Faeries. Of course. Now she knew where she'd heard the term – Nimue, saying _I could leave if I wanted, and go back to the twilight lands, but they're not what you'd call hospitable there. _

"Why are you telling me this?" she asked. "Blue won't like it."

His eyes met hers, and only in the darkness did they match, black as ink. "Blue doesn't own me," he said shortly. "And Vaje helped me when I needed it. He didn't ask for anything in return. He just helped. I guess if I had friends, he'd be a friend. So – I thought he'd want you to know."

"Thank you," she whispered. "How long before he comes back?"

Aspen grimaced. "There's two ways into the twilight lands. One way, they play by our rules. The other – the looking glass – we play by theirs. They feed on pain and Vaje, he's got plenty of that." He cocked his head, swallowing nervously. "Less since he met you, though. Seems like you make him happy."

His words were a knife in her heart: she missed Vaje with an intensity that frightened her, that made her wanted to fold around the fact of his absence and shed stupid futile tears over him.

"What can I do?" she said, voice husky with heartache. "Can I go after him?"

"You'd die," he said simply. "When we go in there, we never use mirrors. The other entrances are all miles away. 'Sides, he's been there at least a day now. If he's not dead, he'll come back." Aspen paused, then reached out and gingerly patted her on the arm before offering what he apparently thought were words of comfort. "Vaje's a Fury, you know. He knows how to kill."

She swallowed hard. Oddly, she felt a little better. "Thanks."

His smile was sudden, and rather sweet. "Hey, no problem. Listen, I have to go. If I'm not back soon, I'll miss breakfast and Tam's mom will ask me some really uncomfortable questions. But, um, don't worry about Vaje. He's survived for eight hundred years. I'm sure he can manage another couple of days."

"I don't understand why he even went," she said. "It sounds like madness."

Aspen shrugged. "Ross said he was asking about the Furies in the way back when. He mentioned a name, come to think of it. Nina...Nadine..."

Her stomach sank. And she spoke a name that had not passed her lips in a thousand years. "Nimue Fairchild."

"Yeah..." His eyes widened. "How'd you know?"

She didn't answer. Nimue. Nimue who had gone as mad as her sister when Merlin died – whose smile had flashed as crookedly and briefly as a lightning bolt, who'd gone through the battlefield with nothing in her hands but fistfuls of magic, the ground freezing in her wake. Lisa had thought her dead.

And Vaje had gone to the twilight lands to find her because Lisa had been foolish enough to say two words to him, because he was a good man so very like that other good man that she and Nimue had known: Merlin.

And just like him, she had said _help me_ and Vaje had listened.

They were so alike, with only one difference. Vaje was alive. Merlin had died trying to help her.

X - X - X - X - X

"It's me," Vaje said. Slowly, his mind absorbed details. "And I'm wearing the same clothes. Which means..."

He couldn't say it. It was ludicrous.

"Time travel," Nimue supplied. There was no mockery in her expression. "Yes. It's real. An unexpected side effect of the Fey's secession from the Night World. We demanded you create us a world of our own, a place safe from humanity. And so they made the twilight lands – an eternal moment of winter, outside time. It wasn't until later that Titania discovered just what that meant."

"How does that even work?" he said, flabberghasted.

She took off the simple necklace she wore. It was a thin chain with a round pendant hung upon it. Nimue stretched it between her fingers, a gleaming silver line. "Imagine this is time. You move from one end to the other. Everything links together. But when our world was made, it was created separate, beyond. Like the pendant."

She tilted the chain. The pendant slid down it with a hiss.

"The twilight lands are anchored to your world, but not to time," she said. "We can move along time just as the pendant moves along the chain."

"I get the feeling it isn't that simple," he remarked. He felt light-headed, but there could be no mistake.

Nimue gave him a half-smile. "The spells are complex. But I can cast them – if you agree to go."

He looked at the memory of himself stepping through Stonehenge. "Interesting paradox."

"You can refuse," she said softly.

"Why do you need me to go back in time?" he said. "What can I do that you can't?"

She sighed. "I need your help. Lisa is in danger – a danger I was unable to see a thousand years ago, but which has become crystal clear in hindsight. Several attempts were made on her life. And only your intervention kept them from succeeding."

"Me?" he said, incredulous. "I think Lisa would remember."

She shook her head. "Ask me for a glamour. I'll disguise you. I would not expose you to more danger than is necessary. If I am right – and I hope I am not – her foe is still alive, and extremely dangerous. Where Alexandros is, she will follow."

"Who are we talking about?" he demanded.

"The legends got it wrong." She shivered. "There was a love triangle, yes, but not the one people believed. There was no Lancelot, no noble knight. There was only Lisanor, Alexandros, and the other woman who loved him, who would kill to have him. She was beautiful as the sun and every man in Britain wanted her. Every man except the one who made her his queen. Lisanor, Alexandros – and Guinevere."

X - X - X - X - X

Interesting times, these.

Guinevere wondered why Lisanor had been visiting Malefici. She needed Lisanor dead, and dead in a way that had no links to her. It would not do to have Alexandros suspect: no, she had nearly fallen into that trap last time. It must seem mere mischance, a natural progression of sorts.

That was why Cern Akafren was so valuable.

She slipped out of the shadows. The air had the stillness of a graveyard. Malefici's house was small and insignificant. It reminded her of the hovels in Britain, poky, dark places that stank of smoke and mud.

Guinevere eyed the front door, or what remained of it.

If the boy did run Nightfire, they had fallen far indeed. Its ruin had been more successful than she could ever have imagined.

Though there were rumours that the Furies had returned to Hades, this boy among them. When this was over, she would put a stop to that. No need for anyone to know what lay at its end. No need at all.

Her feet were a silent whisper over the ground, her eyes shining silver and her lips red as freshly-spilt blood.

Before she was halfway to the house, he saw her. The boy strolled down the hallway as if she was no threat at all and his arrogance amused her.

"Did you want something?" he said coolly.

"Bane Malefici, I assume," she said.

"Do you? How presumptuous." He held no weapons. Maybe he thought he didn't need them. He was right, if only because they would be useless. "And you are?"

"Oh, I don't think that's important."

His smile had a cold slant to it, frosty as his eyes. "I disagree."

She was surprised at the strength of the power he threw at her like a javelin, black and jagged and toxic. But she only reached down to the piece of her that belonged to the Lethe, and when it hit her, she let herself forget how to feel pain, and all his might simply rolled off her like water.

"You're quite a precocious child," she told him softly. "But a child all the same. And you can kick and scream as much as you want, but you will give me what I want."

She gave him no time to protest – she sent a wave of forgetting at him. It hit his mental shields like a stormy sea. His resilience was startling, but it was in vain. She admired him for that. Very few people could have held on so long, fighting her even as his own mind convinced him she was not there.

His shields buckled, and vanished. Guinevere stepped inside his mind, careful as she would be in any enemy land.

Interesting. For all his youth, his mind was a veritable fortress. It was not so unlike treading through the icy ravine in Hades, full of strange lights and traps. He had promise, and plenty of power with it.

And he had the answers she wanted.

"There is a certain spell," she said. "It raises the dead. Where is it?"

He struggled, but as futilely as a fly cocooned by webbing. At last the answer was drawn from him, every word sharp as broken glass.

"Upstairs."

She sighed. So he wanted to be difficult. "I require you to give me the exact location of the spell, and complete, honest and clear information about any defences you may have arranged around it."

His fury simmered all around her, but Guinevere brushed it away with a touch.

"In the loft. There's a wooden beam which bisects the room. A third of the way along, there is a flaw in the grain. Press it, and a panel will open up beneath the window in the west wall. Five wards protect it. The first has a keyword – _shimmer_. The second is a nursery rhyme – oranges and lemons. The third requires you to tap out the name of my first kill in Morse code. Carinna. The fourth will test that you have drunk the waters of the Styx."

A tricky combination. She could make him fetch it, but that was risky. Erasing memories completely had a high price: the Lethe conferred only a finite amount of power, and any permanent change to someone's mind meant a little more drained away.

And she had already used so much of it in that dark shed where Lisanor screamed and Alexandros faced down Hades.

No. She might yet need her power.

Guinevere meant go then, but curiosity spurred her on. "Why was Lisanor here?"

"She had a promise to keep."

"What promise? I want an exact, honest and full account," she added with some exasperation. The boy was slippery as a lawyer.

Silence as he fought. She flooded his mind with forgetting until the icy cavern was shrouded in fog and his fury was nothing but a dim buzz.

"She wanted some of his DNA to make talismans for her friends so Alexandros could not play parlour tricks with their memories." Something like a snarl erupted around her; she quelled him. "I gave her the fur I had on the condition she would replace it."

So Alex did not know Lisa had taken his blood. That held promise: great promise. Excitement grew in her.

Maybe a little power then. She stretched into his memories and gave them a little twist, a little tweak. He would act, and think it his own scheming. And all the while, he would serve her, as so many had before him.

And then she eased from his mind, and left him in the dark as she went upstairs to fetch the spell. It was as he had said: a beam, a knot, a panel that slid open without a sound to reveal the scroll, spells that she broke one by one.

A slight smile curved her mouth as she reached in, cupping the fragile parchment as gently as if it were a wounded bird. She had the tool she needed to ensure Lisanor would die at last, as she should have fifteen hundred years ago.

Of all Merlin's magic, this was surely the greatest. A prize fit for a queen. Fit for her.

X - X - X - X - X

After Aspen left her, Lisa didn't want to go home. There was too much emotion boiling in her veins. So instead, she called in a promise.

The Blood Rose Café was quiet: few people wanted to brave the snow for a coffee. The waitress greeted her with the ease of long familiarity, and brought her usual order. Lisa settled into the couches in the corner and watched the world go by, swept along on flakes of snow.

For a few moments, she managed to forget everything but the scent of fresh-brewed coffee, and the careless ceaseless snow outside the glass.

Then a hand waved in front of her eyes.

She started: Cern was failing to hide a grin as he peeled off a hat and gloves.

"I've been calling your name for the last minute," he said. "You were off with the fairies."

With a sickening lurch, reality crashed back in on her. It was Vaje who was with the faeries, lost in the twilight lands.

He frowned. "Did I say something wrong?"

"No," she said quietly. "It's just been a long day."

"Huh." He sat down opposite her, eyes narrowed. She'd forgotten that look: that of a healer searching his patient for wounds. "I'm not buying it. Yesterday Malefici was kicking the crap out of you. Today I walk in to find you looking like...gods, like someone just died."

There was a pause as the waitress came over, smiling shyly at Cern. She was a junior, and she looked at him like a lot of girls did. It wasn't hard to see why: it hadn't been so long ago that Lisa had looked at him that way.

He wasn't handsome, but his smile had an easy charm. His hair was mussed and wavy, his jaw covered in stubble that might have been called designer in someone more image-conscious. And he always gave his full attention to a conversation, whether it was an order for coffee, or – as it was about to be – a heartfelt confession.

"No one's died," she said. "Yet. Cern, I have some things to tell you. About me."

So she talked, soft-voiced, and he listened. Their mugs slowly emptied as she told him about a human girl who'd fallen head over heels in love with a king, and who had eventually found out that he'd lied to her. She told him about a great war, and about that king's promise, thrown over her like a net.

"Now he's here. He's found me. And I'm scared that he'll use you as leverage."

She could not look at him. It was an incredible tale: and it was harder telling him than it had been all the others. Perhaps because she knew that they'd had their own lies, their own moments of folly. Cern's only crime had been his bloodline.

"Lise." His hand closed over hers: his voice was gentle. "It's okay. I'll run a mile if I see him."

"You can't," she said. "It's Alex."

His fingers tightened on hers. "The werewolf? Flick's friend?"

"The same."

"Shit. Does she know?"

She shook her head. "Not unless he's told her. Which is unlikely. Alex only tells the truth when it's more useful than a lie. And he's very, very good at lying."

"He can't be that good," Cern pointed out. "You caught him out."

She looked up. He wore a faint smile, not quite enough to drive the shadows out of his eyes. "No. I didn't. I'd never have known if it hadn't been for his queen. She was a Briton, and she married him for political reasons, but she knew him better than I did. And she was always fair. That was why she told me – she didn't like lying for Alex. So she broke her silence, and sometimes I wish she hadn't, but mostly...mostly I'm grateful to her. If it hadn't been for Guinevere, I'd be nothing but his toy."

"Guinevere?" he echoed, sounding startled. "She helped you?"

"I know. The legends got it all wrong. Arthur gets to be the wronged husband, Guinevere's the tart who ran off with his best friend."

"Yeah." He looked at her, gaze direct. "This is kind of mind-blowing, Lise."

"I know. I'm sorry – for all of it."

His grin surprised her; it was exultant, and fearless, and everything she had missed about him. "I'm not. You never know, Lise, this might wind up being the best thing that could have happened."

"That's not how I'd describe my nutjob soulmate showing up," she volunteered.

"No?" He raised his eyebrows. "It ends here, doesn't it? Come on, we've done this before. We fight, we kick ass, we do the impossible, and Crazy McStalker goes away."

Optimism wasn't exactly what she'd expected from Cern, considering what had happened when he encountered his soulmate and a big bad something: they'd been the same person.

"That's the aim," she admitted cautiously. "But it's a bit more complicated than that."

"Since when do you believe in giving up?" he demanded.

Since when did you stop believing in giving up? she felt like asking, but another part of her had missed this too much to question it. It felt like she had her friend back. "I don't."

"Then why are we even arguing? C'mon, we can find better things to disagree about. Like exactly how long it's going to be before Jepar realises that disco is a recognised crime against humanity."

She snorted. "Never. And when the day comes that we take down the forces of evil with a dance-off, we'll be glad we've got him."

It was a long time since she'd heard Cern laugh. And as the day dissolved under a slew of caffeine and good-natured contention, she began to hope again.

X - X - X - X - X

Eventually, they left the café, slipping and sliding through the icy streets. They clung onto each other for balance, and Lisa was surprised to find that all her old feelings for him had melted away like week-old snow. Before Vaje, she'd pined for Cern, wanted him, and never quite dared reveal herself.

What remained was better than infatuation, better than unrequited longing: a deep, abiding affection that warmed her as the pair of them went back to the woods.

"I'm not saying you're wrong," he continued, tiptoeing over the slush as gingerly as a cat, "...well, actually, I am, but-"

He grabbed for her as his feet went and Lisa giggled as he very nearly did the splits in the midst of the woods.

"Instant karma," she said cheerfully.

Cern shot her a mock-glare. "As proof goes, that's a pretty lame argument against a higher power. It's just about a contradiction. Karma suggests design..."

"No, it suggests a pattern," she said, the dignity of her point destroyed as she slid forward a couple of feet, arms windmilling. "Evolution has a pattern too. That doesn't mean someone's sitting up there with an ethereal Etch-a-Sketch. Honestly, Cern, after everything we've seen, how do you still believe in gods?"

"The fact I keep calling on them to do spells might have something to do with it," he pointed out. "And last time I checked, my magic worked. In fact..."

His eyes narrowed, and a spiral of fire the same deep violet of his eyes twisted from his palms to melt the snow before them with a hiss.

"Yep. Still works." He grinned, but it had a crooked twist. "Besides, if you don't believe in the great whatever, how do you explain soulmates? It's someone's idea of a joke, that's for sure."

It was the closest they had come to speaking about Jal, about it all, without anger.

"Then it needs a better punchline," she said quietly. "Look at us. Look at what they've brought us to. These people, these soulmates, they hold your heart hostage. I want to choose who to love. I don't want the choice made for me. I don't want to be told that here's my future, all wrapped up, here's my heart tied up with a bow for some stranger to have because, hey, that's destiny, it's their sacred right to poke through my thoughts and my feelings and my secrets."

Her voice was rising: she stamped through the slush as if it offended her.

"Because here's the thing, Cern, here's the thing I hate about it all. It might not be fate. It might just be DNA or pheromones or some huge, tricky, thoughtless spell. But whatever it is, it's made me into someone's other half. I'm not even whole: I'm just this broken, divided _thing_ waiting for my happy ending."

"Lise..." Cern sounded utterly bemused, as well he might. He'd loved his soulmate.

She didn't slow – she didn't stop, the words pouring out of her like nuclear wind with all the poison of the long years.

"But I want my own ending. I want to learn to love, not have it thrown at me. I want to spend hours and hours talking and taking it all on trust, because I can't just dip into someone's soul and pull out the truth. I want to look into his eyes and have no idea what he's thinking, what's he's feeling, and god, to touch him and feel lightning that doesn't come from some stupid link. I want to be amazed again and again by a touch, by the way he says my name, by the sight of sunrise on his face. I want to fall in love, and keep on falling, keep on deciding that I love that man, that stupid stubborn selfish man, that I choose him every day, every night, every - single – time!"

Her voice was a crack of thunder on the snow-scoured sky. It felt good to speak, to feel all the anger slewing out of her, as if she'd rinsed some lingering scummy residue from her heart.

Cern was staring at her, agape. Then he cracked a rueful smile, the shadows back in his eyes, and said, "That's a hell of an argument. But...one question, Lise?"

Chest heaving, she waited.

"Why haven't you said this to Alex?" he said. And then he left her, and went back to his Pack without waiting for an answer.

He knew her well enough to realise that she didn't have one.

X - X - X - X - X

"Is there anything else I should know?" Vaje asked.

"The less you know, the better," Nimue said quietly. "Too many strange thoughts in your mind, and Artos or Guinevere might think to look closer. They are king and queen in a troubled land – even a hint of treachery might see you dead. I've given you all the help I dare. There is nothing more to do but send you back, and hope."

He could feel her glamour tingling on his skin, like fading pins and needles. That had solved the language barrier: she had passed him some of her gift of tongues.

"Is it far?" he asked.

"Far enough," she said with a grimace. "You cannot tarry here much longer, or Titania will hear a mortal is in the twilight lands."

"She's heard," Vaje said. "She invited me to dinner. As the main course."

Nimue's breath hissed between her teeth. "Then we must go. Now. She doesn't take rejection well." Her movements were brisk – she threw on a cloak which seemed thin as gossamer, hardly fit protection against the cold. "We are safe until we leave my lands-"

She opened the door. A thick wall of mist greeted them.

Nimue gasped: the door slammed shut, but tendrils of mist crept through the cracks.

"The Queen's Breath," she muttered, grim. "She is eager indeed to have you."

He backed away from the mist, which spread slowly over the floor in a thin haze. "What is that?"

"A spell. A very powerful one." She seized his hand. Warmth spread through him, the soft dull glow of sunshine on skin. "I can protect you from it, but whatever you do, don't let go of me."

"What happens if I do?"

"One breath of that and your body will be convinced you're in the middle of a blizzard. You can look forward to frostbite, lung-rot, delerium, and a quite incredible amount of pain."

He grimaced. "Lovely. How long will that last?"

She glanced at him, a sudden surge of pity in her eyes. "The rest of your life. Which is likely to be much shorter."

He heard the disbelief stark in his words. "Because of that – a bit of mist?"

"You defied Titania. She has no mercy."

"She wanted to kill me. What was I supposed to do? Let her?"

Nimue's laugh was breathy and bitter. "Yes."

He had heard legends of the Fey. Now he saw the truth behind the cotton-candy fairytales, beautiful and brutal and so alien he could not see past the bright cold skies that stretched through her eyes.

Then her face softened, humanity creeping past her faery cold. Her grip on his hand tightened.

"You would have seemed a fine prize to her when you came walking down the mirror roads, fresh from the sunlit lands and flush with love and need and hope," she said slowly. "Titania hungers for such things – such feelings – and you would have fed her well. From the moment, you chose to enter our world by our rules, you put yourself in her hands. And if she cannot own you, she will kill you."

"Sounds like someone else we know," he said.

"Yes," she said, dreamy and startled. "I suppose they are of a kind."

The mist was curling about his ankles; it hovered only inches from him and every now and then, a wisp stretched out to prod at him, only to recoil from Nimue's magic.

"We must run all the way," she said. "I don't know how long I can hold off Titania. Remember – don't let go. No matter what you see or hear."

Vaje nodded: they went to the door, and saw her hand shaking as she drew back the latch. Thn the mist curled above them like a vast wave and crashed down: it broke into a multitude of wisps that flowed back into the whole. And they ran into it, he trusting her magic to protect them.

The fog drew back like curtains, and the thorns loomed forth from it like nightmare creations, dark and twisting. They too parted for Nimue, and the pair of them ran down the narrow path, the mist soaking up their footsteps.

He could not say how long they ran: when they left the thorns, the road became more treacherous, slick with ice, ever-shifting. His breath burned in his lungs, but he was used to running under the moon, used to the shadowy amorphous shapes of twilight.

Then the ice before them moved – it rose up into a shining fanged beast that lunged at Nimue. Its teeth sank into her leg – there was a terrible gristly sound of bone and flesh crunching, and she shrieked. Her grip never loosened, but she could not fight it.

Vaje didn't break his stride: his next step became a savage kick, all his momentum behind it. It connected with its muzzle - it shattered into splinters of ice.

He caught Nimue before she fell, and she clung to him briefly, hair a red mesh over her eyes, teeth bared in pain. Blood oozed from the wound, and he could see how mangled her flesh was.

"Can you heal that?" he said.

"No time," she said in a voice thick with pain, and began to limp on.

"Don't be ridiculous," he told her. "I can carry you. It'll be quicker."

She hesitated, then slowly, grudgingly, nodded. He swept her up – she was light as autumn leaves, as though her bones were hollow, as though she had no more substance than the sky. Vaje ran on, watching the road carefully.

He leapt monsters that rose up from the ice. He dodged the dark shapes that peeled out of the mist with wings and claws. All were silent as winter, appearing with no more warning than a hint of shadow on the ground, in the mist.

For the first time, he thanked the Furies for their brutal training, for the reflexes they had beaten into him.

He was so immersed in watching the way ahead that he didn't hear it at first. He only felt Nimue tense.

"No, oh no..." she whispered, the sound moving no further than the two of them.

Bemused, he paused - then he heard it. A soft, high sound that carried on the still air. Bells.

"Titania's riders," Nimue whispered, fingers tightening on his neck. "She's coming for us."

He ran then like he was racing the North Wind. Pain began to burn in his muscles, a dull warning. Soon the bells were joined by a low thunder – hoofbeats, far off, but coming ever closer. He ruthlessly suppressed the tinge of panic.

Then two new shapes loomed forth from the mist, and did not move. A pair of narrow black spires, barely a metre apart.

"There," she said, and he skidded to a halt between them, setting her down carefully. "Keep hold of me. I'll open the gateway, but I'll need to call you back almost as soon as I have sent you. Moments will have passed for me – but it will be months for you. Remember to come back armed, a year hence on Samhain. Bring iron."

"A year?" He swallowed. Too late to think about it now. "I'll remember."

She placed her hands on the spire, grimacing while he supported her, and whispered to the stones as softly as if they were living. Although he understood the words, later he could not recall them – they were fluid as oil, sliding away on the croon of her voice.

Her hands tightened: above the stones, clouds gathered like some vast whirlpool centred on the spires. The cold thickened, tinged with the scent of ozone.

Lightning flickered in the thunderheads, white and knifelike, and Nimue trembled between the stones. When she threw back her head, her eyes had rolled back to show only white. Her lips moved in one last word, a long hoarse gasp, and lightning lanced down between the stones.

The sheet of fire he had seen in her memories flared up.

"Go," she gasped, crumpling onto him. Vaje set her down carefully, and she kept contact with him to the last as he went into the curtain of flames: before the heat leapt over him, the last thing he felt in this world, this time, was the press of her fingers.

For one moment, he burned: but he had endured the Phelgethon, the river of fire, and survived, and so he walked on. There was pain and nothing but more pain beyond it, but he walked on, and then it was gone.

He stood on a hill, and the rain felt like balm upon his skin. Vaje looked into the face of Nimue Fairchild again, a thousand years in the past.

X - X - X - X - X

Lisanor hadn't changed.

Guinevere's heart sped at the sight of her old enemy. Take away the modern clothes, and she was still the same girl, forever a teenager, forever on the brink of maturity, and never quite able to reach it.

The jealousy welled up in her. That Lisanor lived and was loved and didn't even appreciate her luck was obscene. Unfair. Intolerable.

Her fingers felt the spell, caressed it as her saving grace. If it played out as she planned, it would be enough. But there was no harm in a little insurance, was there?

No harm in shaving the odds before the game began. All was fair in love, and war – and this was both.

X - X - X - X - X

It was turning into a beautiful day. The sun gleamed like a medallion above, melting away the clouds. The crisp ice crunched underfoot: everything smelt fresh and clean. It seemed unfair that nature should put on such a show when she just couldn't appreciate it.

At least when she got home, Toya might be up. She needed to talk her to her, find out about the twilight lands and test out her Alex-proofing.

And-

A splintery creak was the only warning she got – something dark rushed at her from above, and Lisa dived sideways, hands scraping on the hard ground. An almighty crash reverberated in her ears – something slammed into her foot, leaving a trail of white-hot pain, and then there was only a frantic rustling.

Gasping, she turned to examine the damage – and froze.

A huge branch lay before her, its leaves still quivering with the impact. Her foot was beneath it, caught under spiky twigs. Slowly, wincing, she extricated it. Flashes of pain shot through her leg as she dragged herself back.

It could have killed her. If she hadn't moved, it probably would have done.

Then Lisa saw the end of the branch. It was ragged, the flesh of the wood white and healthy. It hadn't just fallen. Someone had torn it from the tree as easily as if peeling an orange.

The back of her neck prickled with the weight of unseen eyes. There was no one in sight, but that just meant they could be anywhere.

Panic hit her – she reached out instinctively, her mind flying for the one person she knew would protect her without a thought...

But Vaje wasn't there. Shaken, she sent out a call to the others: there was Jepar, a sleepy green bundle who shot upright at the shrillness of her voice.

_Lise? What's happened?_

_A...a tree fell on me. Not an accident. _

_Alex?_

She gathered her troubled thoughts. No. This wasn't his style. He'd try persuasion before power. _Someone else. I don't know. _

She had to get out of here. Lisa wobbled upright, staggering as she tried to put weight on her foot. Her sneakers hid any damage, but it didn't feel good. Slowly, she began to limp back to town, fear in every step.

_You're hurt! _Anger quickly replaced Jepar's alarm. _We'll come and get you._

_Hurry up. I'm in no state to fight them off if they come back for more._

An empty laugh rolled out behind her, and a voice came rolling over the air like a crow's call, distorted and rasping and cruel. _It's not me who'll come back, darling, not me at all..._

There was something familiar in that voice, something that sent fear coursing down her spine, and made her think of smoke and heat and a terrible black place full of teeth and anguish. She could not remember – she could not quite forget...

She threw a glance over her shoulder. Nothing but the trees and the shadows, lining her way like prison bars. Lisa went faster, ignoring the pain, memories chasing her down like hounds.

And in the darkness, Guinevere smiled at her fear, and felt the first thrill of victory.

_I said, hey, girl with one eye__  
Get your filthy fingers out of my pie  
I said, hey, girl with one eye  
I'll cut your little heart out 'cause you made me cry_

Thanks so much - all feedback is adored!


	12. Chapter Eleven

Okay. Didn't realise it had been quite this long since I updated. I can only offer huge, grovelling apologies.

Some things have changed, but one thing hasn't - you guys remain utterly amazing. Huge thanks to the extremely wonderful people who reviewed last time round.

Thank you: **ihateeee, Finding Limbo, Bec** (Life _really_ got in the way this time. But thing have smoothed out now, so I remain hopeful. It's good for Blue to be reminded he can get his ass kicked occasionally. Cern...yeah...things get interesting for him in the next few chapters. Thank so much!), **ess3sandra, Kkat84, Mandy **(well, I do love a good cliffhanger - thank you!), **Juv** (Heh, not dead. Just having a bit of a rubbish year. Things are, however, looking up! Aspen was giving Blue the information because he's got the treaty with the Fey carved onto his back, so he needs to know if someone's doing something stupid that might break it. Yeah, definitley good for Blue to realise he isn't always the nastiest fish in the sea ;) Thanks!)** dancelikeyoujustdon'tcare, wendy **(Yeah, it has been a while. Sorry about that! Yes, I will continue OR and A Lady's Shield. OR is a rewrite, though - the original's up on my website. Yep, Blue doesn't come against much that he can't fight, but in this case, he's being steamrollered by a Fury that's got a hell of a lot more power than him. And it keeps him sort of humble. Ish. Ah, no, as an author you can choose whether you just want people with accounts to review or whether you're good with 'anonymous' reviews. Me, I like to hear feedback wherever it comes from :) So you don't need an account. Thank you!), **mudkiprox, Rialaea, fate-chan **(Thank you! I'm glad you like it - took a little while, but new chapter!), **sephare **(First, thank you for such a long and detailed review! He did do something unforgivable; unfortunately, as neither of them ever discussed it, they both think it's something different. Which you can thank Guinevere for. I think Alex is struggling to decide what he really wants; he's never been too sure who he is, only what he is right at that particular moment. Guinevere is really very bad-ass. She makes Alex's obsession look positively pedestrian. Oops, thanks for the feedback on the pronoun confusion! I will go back and check and edit. I need to get better at that. I think it will be very, very hard for Lisa to forgive Alex, because he didn't some pretty crappy things when he was young and power-hungry. I'm thrilled you're enjoying the fic - thank you so much!), and last but by no means least, the pulchritudinous **purple halo**.

As might be a tad obvious, I really do love hearing what you think. Please bear with me as I catch up on replies. I promise to suck less going forward.

Lyrics taken from _Summer of John Wayne _by Tom McRae (Album: Alphabet of Hurricanes). Hope you enjoy!

**Long Lost Part Eleven**

_And a summer of searching_  
_The underworld  
An arrow in my heel  
And the winding down of days  
And the speeding up of time won't change_

Vaje had read once that the past was another country, which was more true than the author had known. It turned out that country was Britain: cold wet windy Britain, hunched in the middle of the Dark Ages.

At least the hut was warm, if reeking of smoke. He warmed his hands over the dismal fire, glad of the heat. Nimue sat opposite, watching him with the distant, shrewd eyes of a hawk.

"Perhaps you could begin by telling me who you are." She breathed in deeply, as if inhaling a scent. "And why you reek of Fey magic."

He glanced up through a veil of smoke that stung his eyes. "I'm a traveller."

"From what strange world?" she said, her words wistful. "I have been along the spice roads to the East, and over the steppes of the North. I have crossed the deep deserts, and the deeper oceans, and still your voice is new to me."

"Then you haven't travelled far enough," he answered, scrubbing the rain from his hair. She would travel another fifteen hundred years to hear his accent, through war and peace and uneasy truce. "I was told you might help me."

"By who?"

He met her eyes, bright and unreachable as stars. "By you."

She sat, unblinking. Then she clipped out, "Prove it."

Vaje paused, recalling her words, spoken in a far away future. "You were a summer child, born in our world. Then one day, your father came for you, and took you into the twilight lands. You cried that night, not because it was cold, or because it was dark, or because his fingers were like chains – though they were - but because you couldn't hear the birds singing in the morning. They used to wake you, every day, but in the twilight lands, no one ever sang. The only music they knew was the sound of tears and so you woke to weeping, and wept with them."

Her mouth trembled: she turned her head sharply so he could not see her face, hidden behind that cloud of red hair. "I am convinced," she said in a voice hard as granite.

"I'm sorry," he said, wanting to take back that cruel reminder of her childhood, and wondering, a little, why she'd told him when it brought her only pain.

"Don't be. It's gone." But her brittle bearing did not alter. This was a different woman to the one he'd met: less quick to smile, far more fragile. "What do you need from me?"

"A glamour to change my appearance, one subtle enough to pass notice. And an introduction. I have a task to complete which I mustn't fail."

"I would ask what, but I already know you won't tell me." She glanced back then: her eyes dull with grief. "Only that it must be urgent, or I would not have told you of that day. I will keep your secrets, traveller, if you keep mine."

He wished he had words of comfort to offer, but he knew already the bleak future. She would weep again, for more than a land empty of birds; for a land empty of hope, and the man she would inexorably love.

"I'll take them to the grave," he said solemnly.

She smiled, though it was faint and sad. "Let us hope not."

oOo

"This is nasty," Chatoya said as she peeled away Lisa's clothes from the long gash on her leg. Lisa bit her lip against the pain as the scabs reopened. "Someone meant business."

It was worse than she'd first thought: the tree had cut her calf open before it smashed onto her foot. She'd had to lean on Jepar all the way home, refusing to be carried only because she wouldn't give whoever had attacked her the satisfaction.

"Question is, who?" Cougar asked from where he held Lisa's leg, hands surprisingly gentle. His voice was anything but, harsh with anger. "Your creepy stalker boyfriend thinks he's in with a shot, so he's not going down the Norman Bates route just yet. The Pack aren't that subtle. We all know my brother likes to get in a little light mutilation before breakfast, but he'd have stuck around to gloat, so we can probably rule Blue out...who's left?"

"A Fury trying to get to Toya through us?" Jepar suggested, handing Chatoya a salve.

"Maybe," murmured the witch. "I wouldn't put it past them."

"It's not exactly the work of a diabolical genius, though," Lisa said, grimacing as the sticky salve stung the cut. "I'm still alive."

"It could have been a warning," Cougar mused. "The Furies love mind games."

"Whatever it is, it needs healing," Chatoya said. Carefully, she unlaced Lisa's sneaker. "Sorry, Lisa, but there's no easy way do this."

She gritted her teeth as the shoe slid off in a wash of agony. There was blood all over her foot, tacky and almost black. Chatoya delicately prodded her battered flesh, and light as her touch was, it hurt.

"God, babe," Cougar muttered. "Someone didn't want you walking home."

"It's fixable." Toya's face was a picture of concentration. "Your toes are pretty badly broken, but it could have been a lot worse."

"Lucky me," Lisa muttered through her teeth.

Chatoya glanced at her, smile apologetic. "This is going to hurt. I'm going to have to realign all your toes, then grow new bone over the breaks."

Jepar and Cougar both looked green around the gills. She didn't feel much better.

"Let's get it over with then," she said.

"You might want to hold onto something," Chatoya warned, head bent over her mangled foot.

Lisa looked at the boys. Green and hazel eyes looked back, filling up with alarm. "Hands," she ordered.

"Wave goodbye to your knuckles, JJ," Cougar said darkly, but obeyed without hesitation.

Jepar put on a brave smile as he took her hand. "Just remember, damage these hands and you'll never see the Macarena again."

"There's the silver lining I was looking for," Lisa joked. He only looked wounded.

"Ready?" Chatoya enquired. "Okay...three, two, one..."

Afterwards, no one was sure who screamed louder. All they could agree on was that, alas, Jepar would jive another day once the bruises had faded.

oOo

Ryars Valley was full of secrets. It had been so ever since the girl it was named for had been buried there. A princess died for love, or lack of it, and the great war between the dragons and the witches ended.

The war ended: the secrets began. Upon them was founded a town, people drawn first to a legend, and later to a haven. Until a woman who'd changed a world was nothing but a name to most people.

But Alex was not most people.

That was why he went through the woods as silently as a ghost, skimming the very edge of the trees that ran beside the lake. At last he reached his destination, where he had not been in nearly a hundred years: hidden behind a mat of creepers, the entrance to a cave.

He pulled at the vines until there was a gap big enough for him to edge through. The sunlight vanished as he followed the twists and turns he had memorised long ago.

Beneath the verdant fields and the stern steep mountains, in the dark, cool underground, was a vast maze. And at its centre, his destination – and the source of all his power and all his pain.

oOo

Whoever designed the maze had been clever. It ran wide and winding through the valley, full of distractions that drew the careless wanderer far from its true purpose.

In a low-ceilinged grotto, Alex squeezed between a forest of dank smooth stalagmites that seemed to go on forever. His torch threw sharp black shadows like prison bars across the floor and made soldiers of the narrow rocks.

Later, he came into a cave as enormous as a cathedral, its walls studded with jewels that mapped out the history of the Burning Times. There was the fortune of an empire melded into the stone: and only a fool would try to remove it. What magic had entrenched, mere muscle could not move.

The wonders and peculiarities piled up with the hours. He traced his fingers over graffiti written in a dozen languages. At one point, he paused, and smiled – there was his own name, a thousand years old. He stepped over a skeleton, its bones long picked clean, its grin macabre.

When he came to a dead end, Alex did not falter: he flexed his hand, and the cut Lisa had given him reopened – he added his blood to the wall and said to the heedless rock, "Know me, and remember."

His blood sank into the stone as if it were a sponge: only a faint dark gloss remained, and then the wall parted like curtains.

He stepped into a chamber filled with gold light and cold as the arctic. His breath rose in plumes: Alex found himself shivering as if he was back in Hades. The wall sealed behind him without a sound.

Decades had passed since he'd last come here. He had been remiss, perhaps, but seeing it reminded him of what he had given up. Now, with hope like lightning in his blood, it reminded him of what he might reclaim.

It was a strange place: a smooth round room of white marble. Three mirrors, all webbed with cracks, were on the walls. And in the centre of the room was a pillar of granite, coarse and grey and jagged. It would have been nothing but an ugly lump of stone, except for one small detail.

There was a sword lodged in it.

It glowed like a flame, sending ribbons of gold and orange and white light rippling over the marble.

He did not need to read the plaque upon the floor in front of it. It was long imprinted on his heart.

_Only he who knows my true weight may draw me forth._

Alex did as he always did: he circled the room, checking there were no flaws in the walls. He paused at each of the mirrors, from curiosity rather than duty. Each broken reflection showed a room identical to the one he stood in, but they were dim, their contents mere shadows. Still, he knew what lay in those three chambers.

To the west, a spinning wheel with a splintered spindle. To the north, an empty lamp, its lid melted into a brass lump. And to the east, a heap of glass fragments that had once been a shoe. A trio of broken spells, with only this one still holding strong and true.

He found himself in front of the sword, staring. Without meaning to, he reached for it. The hilt was warm and fit his hand perfectly. It would be so easy: with a weapon such as this, he could be a king again. He could be hers again.

Alex gritted his teeth–

And let go. He had promised. King Arthur that was had never drawn the sword from the stone, knowing as he did what it would mean. Even when he had lost everything, he had resisted.

Yet that no longer seemed as important as it once had.

He turned away from it. All was as it should be. He had done his duty, as he always did. As he had done even after it became bittersweet, mere dust in his hands.

The walls absorbed his blood once more, and released him into the world he'd fought so hard for. He left behind the broken fairytales and the empty dreams: instead he went to Lisanor, wishing for better than this.

oOo

Keep your enemies close. Wise advice, and Vaje intended to follow it. Which brought him here: a fortress set high upon a hill and ringed by a busy settlement. Animals grazed on the wide green fields while people wove between the wooden buildings.

They had ridden through relentless storms all night, but the clouds broke just before the hill, revealing unseasonably bare skies.

Nimue seemed to relax as they neared it. "Welcome to Cadbyri," she remarked. "It is Britain's heart, and not easily broken."

"So I see," he replied, eyeing the high walls and the spearman who patrolled the area. "Artos chose well. It's a formidable stronghold."

"As it must be," she said quietly. "The Saxons creep closer with every day that passes. Soon they will wash over Britain like a flood."

Her regret was palpable. He remembered how passionately she had spoken for the Britons, and how little she knew of what was to come. "But not yet."

"Not ever, if we have our way," said a new voice, young and fierce.

Nimue swung her horse around with uncharacteristic haste.

The owner of it was leaning on a stone wall, a faint smile on his face. If the crown of holly leaves hurt at all, it did not show in his eyes, as clear and bright as a summer sky. He looked a lad growing into his bones, but the sheer power that blazed from him was almost painful to feel.

"Merlin," Nimue said with apparent indifference. Her tensed shoulders gave the lie to it. "Can we blame you for the weather?"

He gazed up at the cloudless sky. His black braid fell down his back. "You can thank me for it."

"It's a waste of magic," she said shortly.

Vaje whistled low under his breath. He'd spent enough time with Chatoya to know that controlling the elements was no small task. She'd likened it to juggling hand grenades, and the only time he'd seen her do it, she'd spent the following day bedridden with a malicious migraine.

"You may think so, but Artos disagrees," Merlin said cheerfully. "Our enemy has to ride through a downpour to reach us, and we'll have sight of him long before he squelches up to our gates. Not to mention the flux should whittle down their numbers before they even draw up their lines."

"And what of the harvest you drown elsewhere?" she demanded. "What of the Britons who must slog through the storms you've pushed away? What of their children, and their livestock, and their homes? All so we can have a few minutes warning if the Saxons approach."

"You may be right," he acknowledged. "But those same Britons will not live long if Cadbyri falls."

She opened her mouth for more sharp words. Vaje sensed this was an argument that they had fought before, and could continue all day, so he quietly nudged his mount between them.

"Perhaps you ought to put your case to Artos," he suggested. "Let him decide."

Nimue gazed at him, her beauty illuminated by anger and all the more human for it. Then she said, "Rest assured, I shall."

"And who is this?" There was an edge to Merlin's voice: in one movement, he had seized the quarterstaff beside him, which Vaje saw was carved with runes. "He has the scent of faery magic on him." His eyes narrowed. "Your magic, unless I'm much mistaken."

There was more than a touch of jealousy in the comment. Vaje knew what Merlin saw: a grizzled older man with thick scars upon his arms and the whipcord muscle of a soldier. Nimue's glamour had stunned him a little when he caught his reflection in a pool of water.

Vaje met his stare pleasantly, refusing to be intimidated by the power that reached out to him, probing his defences. The story they'd practiced rolled smoothly off his tongue. "Lady Nimue was kind enough to help me with an old wound."

"You exaggerate, Gawain," she murmured, using his alias. "It was a fair trade for your help in shaking off those outlaws."

"You were attacked?" Merlin said sharply, his attention switching to her with the focus of a hawk.

"Children, toying with lawlessness," she said with a shrug. "A nuisance, but one that might have caused me some minor injuries if Gawain had not been camping nearby. He turned out to be quite handy with a sword."

Helpfully, Vaje drew the weapon at his side. Nimue had loaned it to him to complete the pretence, but he'd used one often enough in the Furies to wield it with ease. "The lady insinuated a man with my skills might find himself of use against the Saxons."

"So you might," Merlin said, but his eyes did not leave Nimue. "You were lucky, my lady."

She laughed: the sound was musical and charming and unexpectedly girlish. "I was born with luck in my blood and clovers in my hair, Merlin, as all faeries are. I would have survived."

He came close to her horse: their eyes locked, blue on blue, and he offered her a hand. She hesitated, then took it and slipped to the ground with the grace of a cat, straight into the circle of his arms.

Neither moved: they only stood like that, inches apart, with heat blooming like roses in her cheeks and his knuckles white with tension upon the staff.

The horse danced away unnoticed until Vaje dismounted and caught its reins. He debated interrupting, but his heart held him back. They would have little enough time together, and the minutes mattered.

Merlin's face was grave, brows drawn. "Life is about more than survival," he said roughly. "Stonehenge is dangerous, Nimue."

"It's our survival we fight for," she answered, lashes dropping. "Isn't that worth a little danger?"

He turned away with a curse. "Did you learn nothing from your sister?" he snapped. "She survives, aye, after she too found a little danger. Mad as a coot, reduced to a mouthpiece for whatever dreams and puzzles the gods choose to send us."

"I am not Morgan," she said softly.

He laughed – it was angry, staccato. "I had noticed. _You_ are eminently more stubborn and infuriating."

"Why?" she challenged. "Because I don't fawn over you? Because I don't obey the mighty Merlin with all his wisdom? I have lived longer than you can imagine, in places so strange you would lose your mind merely finding them. I am a daughter of the Fey, and I am answerable to no one but Artos."

"You have made that quite clear!" Merlin bit out, slamming the staff hard into the ground. Vaje stared as the ground beneath it sprouted moss that spread in spidery lines. The witch straightened: his voice was stilted and formal. "Forgive me my concern – I had no idea it was so unwanted. I apologise for any offence I have offered you, daughter of the Fey, answerable to no one. Live your long life alone and undisturbed. Survive."

Nimue was white as lilies, the colour shed like petals from her face. Her lips were parted, but no words escaped her.

Merlin's voice cracked, baring raw, heated emotion. "If that is all you want to settle for, then so be it!"

A tremendous wind swept down about them, whipping dust and twigs against their skin,. Vaje closed his eyes against it: when he opened them, Merlin was gone.

Nimue stood, arms wrapped about herself, gazing at a kestrel that winged its way to the fortress. Myriad cuts gleamed red on her skin, and healed just as swiftly.

"Are you all right?" Vaje said gently.

"Why wouldn't I be?" she snapped. "He is an overwrought fool, that is all."

Vaje thought of that moment when Merlin and Nimue had stood together, timeless in their intensity, aware of nothing past themselves and the space between them.

"As you say," he said dryly. "We'd best stable the horses."

"Yes," she said, tightly controlled. "Do you still want to go through with this? You play your part well, but you will have to fight for your life to impress Artos."

"I'm a Fury. I've been trained."

"Artos has been to the end of Hades. We all have, here. You have not even been as far as the Styx. You're half-trained."

He acknowledged that with a nod. But these were the Furies of the old days, who remembered when a word could be sharper than a knife, who sought agreement before annihilation, who learned, and studied, and who regarded violence as a last resort and a messy one.

And little as Vaje might like it, he was a modern Fury. He'd spent quite literally years learning to fight, learning to survive against all odds – when he was outgunned, outclassed and out of his comfort zone.

People thought Blue Malefici had changed the Furies, and he had. But he was not the radical everyone believed: he was merely the end product of a culture steeped in violence and cruelty and fear.

And he had taught Vaje how to fight.

"You never know," he said. "I might just surprise you."

oOo

"Hey, are you coming down for some movie magi- what are you doing?" Cougar said, bemusement in his voice.

Lisa didn't look round from where she was very slowly and gingerly stepping into a pair of silver flats. "Getting ready."

"Not that I don't appreciate that astoundingly clingy top," the vampire said, with a wicked note in his voice, "but you're overdressed. It's just us and some nineties chick flicks."

"Chick flicks?" She raised an eyebrow. "I thought you were an action man."

"I am. But Jepar got the casting vote, and Toya used her feminine wiles to convince him. And by feminine wiles, I mean tea. Honestly, there is nothing that guy won't do for some stewed leaves. Now come down so I have someone else to help me mock."

"Um." She turned, wincing at the slight ache. Chatoya had warned her she'd feel fragile for a day or two. "I have a thing to do."

Cougar gave her green halterneck top a dubious look. "By thing, do you mean 'man'? Because you look all dressed-up with somewhere to go."

"If I tell you, you'll shout," she said.

"I might not."

"I'm going to see Alex."

"YOU'RE WHAT?" he screamed. The rafters rattled. "Are you _insane?_"

Lisa withstood his rage with the sanguinity of long practice. "No. Probably."

"What's going on?" came Jepar's voice from below. Footsteps rattled up the stairs, then the pair of them appeared behind Cougar. "Are you going somewhere?"

"To her doom," Cougar said darkly.

"That's a bit overdramatic," Lisa muttered. "I'm just going to see Alex."

His eyes widened, the gold of sunlight. "You...you..." he sputtered, then got a grip. "You complete lunatic! Lisa, you're going to see the guy that you started a war to get away from – a freaking war – and who's spent the last millennia hunting you down because he doesn't handle rejection well. I don't think I'm being over dramatic here. If anything, this is under-dramatic. This should be a full-on theatre performance with the can-can and a band and a red velvet curtain!"

"He has a point," Chatoya ventured. "Not about the curtain. That's tacky. But about seeing Alex."

"I can't get out of it," she said. "I...might have promised."

"So break it," Cougar said impatiently. "Call it revenge. The rest of us will call it common sense, but whatever works for you."

She could feel herself getting defensive, shoulders hunching, lips dry. "I might have promised in blood."

There was a horrible, intense silence. Then Jepar groaned. "You didn't."

"Why?" Chatoya asked, very soft, very calm.

"I needed his blood. To repay Blue. And...and I needed him to believe me."

The witch's eyes narrowed. "You took his blood without him noticing?"

Lisa could feel her face getting hot, the memory of that kiss rushing up in a flush. "I distracted him."

"How?" asked Jepar, staring at her.

Cougar was quietly banging the back of his head on the doorframe. "Feminine wiles, JJ," he said, sounding weary.

"Tea? Seriously? I thought that was just me."

"No, actual wiles," Chatoya murmured, eyes shut. She sounded on the verge of hysterical giggles.

"I kissed him," Lisa confessed. She was trying very hard not to think of just how it had felt: of his warm lips and his tender hands and the world shrinking down to her and him and the space between them.

"Oh. And you definitely have to go?"

She nodded. Jepar stood there, mulling it over. Of the three, he was the only one who seemed rational.

"What's the worst-case scenario?" he said thoughtfully. "I mean, he can't start a war on his own. You still need to find out if he spoke to Hades, right?"

"He did," she confirmed, and Chatoya's eyes popped open, dark and horrified. "But I don't know what powers he has, except that he can't forget the dead."

"As superpowers go, that's pretty naff," remarked Jepar. "If we're going to get rid of him, we have to do it properly. Last time we tried taking on someone's psychotic soulmate without all the information, it didn't exactly go to plan."

He carefully didn't look at Chatoya or Cougar, both of whom had come out of that encounter badly.

"Fine," Cougar said through gritted teeth. "Lisa, are you sure about this?"

Not at all.

"Certain," she answered.

He glared at the ceiling. "When are those damn wards going to be ready, Toya?"

"Tomorrow," she said, voice strained. They were both stiff as carved figurines, and for all the tension in the air, Blue Malefici, the other psychotic soulmate, might have been there with them. He'd not won that battle, but he'd gained a victory of some sort, though Lisa didn't know what.

"Great. Provided Lisa survives tonight, we'll be in a position to actually help instead of watching Matthew McConnaughy gurn at a camera."

"It's Heath Ledger, actually," Jepar chipped in. "And he's singing."

Cougar snarled and stamped out of the room. If there hadn't been two people blocking the door, Lisa suspected he would have slammed it.

Chatoya only gave Lisa a look, one so full of sadness and turmoil that she moved forward to say something, to hug her, but the witch was already following after Cougar, shoulders slumped.

Jepar tipped her a sweet smile. "Good luck," he said. "And...put yourself first, Lise. Not us. You, you hear me?"

She smiled, and she loved him then, as she loved them all. But she didn't answer him, and he only sighed, and left her alone with the night.

oOo

In the woods, the shadows spilled like blood. Guinevere was coated in them, wearing midnight even as the sun sank down into the horizon. Anyone looking at her would have seen only air and darkness. The price for the power had been high, but worth it: shadows trailed her like pets, obeying her every whim.

She had gone to Titania, to the twilight queen, and bargained for power. And so she became a queen of shadows in truth, with faery magic lacing her blood.

Some of her tame shdows, she sent to watch the fringes of the woods. Others scuttled further out, shivering under the last light of the setting sun. The rest, she sent to find the boy who would hurl her plan into action, little though he knew it.

There.

Cern was in the clearing where Jallkri ap Ganra had died, as he had been when she'd found him. He was barely visible in the dimming light, a shadow himself. And just as easily controlled as all the others. His eyes were fixed on the scorched circle, his hands clenched.

"Cern..."

He turned at her voice, and she saw the hope raw on his face.

She held out the scroll: his sharp intake of breath pierced the night. "I found it."

He took the spell from her, handling as if it was spun glass. "How?" said Cern, incredulous. "Malefici's house is like Fort Knox."

She came forward, and pretended to stumble. He caught her, and she clung to him briefly, gazing up into his face with her steady, honest eyes. "I was lucky," she said. "Someone had broken down the door."

He nodded slowly. "Lisa."

"He wasn't there. So I – I broke in. I know it's stupid and risky but...but...I had to take the chance." She let out a soft sigh. "She would have done the same for me. I searched the whole house, god, I thought I'd never find it. If I didn't know what I was looking for, I probably wouldn't have. Stuffed in the chimney, of all places."

"You're sure this is it?" he said, the keen edge in his voice undeniable.

"It's Merlin's writing," she said. "I'd know it anywhere."

His chest was heaving; there was a fever-brightness to his eyes. "I can bring her back," he breathed.

She caught him by the arm. Lips parted, eyes soft, she was a picture of concern. "Cern...I've seen it cast before. It's dangerous. You need to know...you need more than just the words."

That much was true. There were three parts to the spell. He had only two: the will, and the words.

"What else?" he fired at her.

"Sacrifice," she said. "A gift to open the way between the worlds, something of power. I...I don't think you're strong enough."

And here it was: the part he could not play himself.

"But I am," she said, and around them, the shadows formed a wall around the clearing. No one would disturb them: no one would stop this. She would ensure it. "Use my blood. Bring her back."

The will, the words, and the sacrifice.

He stood very still: the look in his eyes was intense, and he said, roughly, "You have no idea what this means."

And the shadow queen smiled as the darkness rose up to swallow them, and thought: neither have you.

oOo

No one noticed Vaje and Nimue as they entered the hall.

It was crammed. A garble of languages filled the air, the rough and ready tongues of several tribes. Long tables filled one end of the hall, laden with roasted meat and bread, lined with men who laughed and shouted. Mead and wine flowed liberally down their throats, served by girls who sometimes smiled and sometimes dodged grabbing hands.

Alexandros sat at the head of one of the tables. A woman of incredible beauty sat beside him, her black hair loose about her shoulders, her lips red and curved and a little cruel. A gold circlet marked her as someone of high status: the ease with which she spoke to Alex named her Guinevere.

Two of the triangle. Only Lisa was missing.

Then Vaje saw her, and ice stabbed his heart.

She came gliding out with a pitcher, and he was not the only one to stare, if for different reasons. The white linen shift she wore was stark against her skin, the gold gleaming at her throat and wrists a flashy show of wealth. No other servants there had such riches: no other servant walked as if she owned the hall and everyone in it.

Altough her features were the same, just the same, it was not his Lisa. Vaje could not say why: except that something was missing in the way she carried herself, in her eyes, in her expression. He could neither name it nor qualify it, but its absence was glaring.

She bent to Alex: he turned his head, and the smile he gave her was tender. Whatever he said made her shine, a beauty so clean and simple that no one could have surpassed her in that brief moment.

Not even Guinevere. And she knew it: Vaje saw the hate twist unguarded in her face, striking as hard as lightning, gone as suddenly.

So it was true, then.

"I see you've spotted Artos and Guinevere," Nimue commented, gliding up beside him. "The girl's his slave. An outlander and a mortal. He's far too attached to her."

"How so?" he asked, watching Lisa move about the table. The warlords eyed her with a mixture of amusement, tolerance and outright suspicion.

"He brought her all the way from the Empire," she said. "She goes everywhere with him. Even Guinevere sees less of Artos than Lisanor does. I admit, she has a certain unpolished charm, and she's a quick study, but I cannot fathom what use he has for her beyond mere sentiment."

He glanced at her. "Isn't sentiment enough?"

She tossed her head, her russet hair like a fall of leaves. "For others, perhaps. But I am surprised to find Artos so weak."

"Who says it's a weakness?" he countered.

"Do you think he has no enemies?" she said in a barely audible voice. "They lurk in the shadows, watching him, searching for some way to control him, and us. His weakness is our weakness. We cannot afford it."

He heard the truth of it. Yet he had seen so much good done for nothing more than sentiment.

"I guess that depends on the price," he answered. "Sometimes, it's worth paying."

She sighed. "And pay we must. Are you ready?"

"Yes," he said firmly. "Let's get on with it."

They cut through the milling crowd. When they reached the high table, Alex looked up from his conversation. "Ah, the Lady Nimue," he said pleasantly. "Back from the plains, I see."

He glanced over Vaje as if he was no one. Good. That meant his glamour was working.

"Indeed, warlord," she said. "With a few matters we must discuss, most of which may wait. But this one will not: Artos, this is Gawain. He is a soldier who would have a place among your men."

Vaje did not move as Alex's power washed through him like a cold fog. Those dark eyes took on new interest. "I only take the best," he declared, cool. "As you should know, Nimue. Send him to the spearmen. He is over-ambitious."

"I prefer to think of it as just ambitious enough," Vaje put in, staring back. Alexandros might have power behind him, but he didn't have Malefici's malevolence or Aspen Martin's absolute recklessness. "I heard you took men on their merits. I'd like the chance to prove mine."

A thin smile quirked up one side of his mouth. "If you insist," Alex said with what sounded like resignation. "The challenge is the same for you as for all the others. Defeat my champion, and you may choose your post. I should point out that no one has yet succeeded, and we have buried a dozen good men."

Vaje gave him a brief bow. "With respect, warlord, I'm better."

"You could have a place among the spearmen, you know," Alex commented quietly. "There would be no disgrace in that."

"Nor any honour," he countered. "I came to serve you, not to serve out time."

Alex gave a shrug. He didn't look pleased. Malefici would have been enjoying the show: Alexandros was a very different kind of leader. "Very well. Do remember that death is distinctly inglorious."

"Good job I'm going to live on a wave of glory then," Vaje said with a confidence he didn't entirely feel. But he was more convinced than ever that he needed to be close to Guinevere and Lisa, and he wouldn't do that from the ranks of the spearmen.

"Galahad," Alex called.

From the midst of the warriors lining the tables, Galahad rose, a gleaming gold figure who stood a full head taller than anyone else. The sword he carried was enormous, and had clearly seen numerous battles from the notches on the crosspiece.

"Warlord," growled Galahad.

He looked like a harbinger of violent death. And indeed, that was what he had been for over a thousand years. Vaje knew that Nightfire had found him hard to control, and in his few meetings with the man, he'd disliked him intensely. Those cold, empty eyes always looked straight through you.

Vaje had also had the dubious pleasure of fighting him once. Malefici and Martin had set it up between them, a sort of show duel that had only ended when Vaje broke both Galahad's kneecaps at once, right before stylishly collapsing in a pool of his own blood.

They'd declared that one a draw.

"Another challenger," Alex announced. "Try to make this one tidy."

An excited rumble swept the room as men rose from the tables, pushing them back to create a large space. Women came in to watch, children darting between legs to find a good vantage point.

Galahad took one look at Vaje and snorted with laughter. "Him?"

"Me," Vaje confirmed. "What's wrong, afraid I'll make you look bad?"

Those teeth bared into a snarl. "I'm afraid of nothing!"

"About time you learned, then," Vaje said, drawing his sword. It felt good in his hand, the long hours of practice coming back to him as he made a few passes.

Galahad strode into their makeshift arena, yanking down his helmet to hide everything but those killer's eyes. "I think not, little man."

Vaje faced him. Adrenalin ran through him like fire, sharpening his senses to icy clarity. There was dead silence, full of anticipation. The broadsword gleamed in Galahad's hand, almost as tall as he was. They were poised, waiting...

And Galahad charged.

The sword chopped down like a cleaver, devilishly quick. But Vaje was gone, dodging away from him with light feet. Again Galahad charged: this time Vaje stood his ground and metal rang on metal, the impacts shivering up his arm. He withstood the blows, varying his defence, testing. Cheers rang out around them – feet stamped, hands clapped, the din soaring to fill the hall.

Yes, Galahad was stronger, so this couldn't be a long fight. And he was fast on the attack and almost as fast on the defence.

But he lacked imagination: always had, always would.

Vaje could see Galahad's eyes, wide and manic through the slit of the helmet. He slowed his reaction, just a little, just enough-

Galahad snarled in triumph and swung his sword as if it were a hammer. Vaje caught the crushing blow, barely – and then they were locked sword to sword, and Galahad's strength bore down upon him like a mountain. For a few moments, Vaje endured, arms straining, back screaming, teeth bared...

And then he let go of his sword, and as Galahad tumbled forward, punched him in the face.

Not chivalrous. But certainly effective.

The gigantic man reeled back, time enough for Vaje to kick his fallen sword back into his hands and feint at his heart.

Galahad moved to block the thrust – and Vaje whipped his blade straight at Galahad's arm.

To his surprise and immense satisfaction, it connected.

There was sudden silence. Everyone could see the spray of blood on the floor.

Now to make good on it. Vaje gave Galahad a lazy, confident smile and said with false solicitousness, "We can stop if you're feeling faint."

He roared, a sound full of thunder and fury, and with predictable violence, charged. The sword came sweeping round like a scythe, a blur of silver at stomach level-

Vaje braced for the impact, which still threw him to the floor. But he twisted, rolled, felt the breath of the longsword pass his throat, and then kicked out, hard. His foot connected with flesh: Galahad toppled like a statue, and as he went down, Vaje caught his sword arm and gave it a bone-cracking twist.

Galahad howled as the weapon clattered from his fingers, and Vaje wasn't quick enough to duck the vengeful elbow that smashed into his cheek. His vision greyed out: but he didn't stop, didn't dare to stop. By the time everything came back into focus, he was on his feet with nothing worse than a resounding headache and the taste of blood in his mouth.

Unfortunately, so was Galahad. But his arm dangled uselessly at his side, and Vaje knew that he just wasn't as good at fighting left-handed.

There was a great hush now, broken only by Galahad's sawing breath.

They circled one another. Vaje didn't move to attack him, just waited, and waited, and waited...

Galahad's patience broke – he darted in and rained down a clatter of blows. One nicked Vaje's chest: he gave a booming laugh, and pressed in further, harder, faster. Suddenly it seemed he'd won – his sword stabbed at Vaje's throat, one last, glorious attack-

But Vaje dropped and the sword waved uselessly over his head. Galahad was unbalanced, unable to recover and by then Vaje had slid sideways to rise behind Galahad. His blade sliced across the back of Galahad's legs; once, twice, in an uncanny echo of a fight far in the future.

Galahad crashing to the floor like a felled tree, and was still.

He had won.

oOo

It was a beautiful night, the sky studded with frosty white stars and a slice of moon that crooked like a finger, beckoning her to him. Fifteen hundred years ago she'd walked under the same stars, fought under them, fled under them.

They were unchanged. Lisa was not.

And Alex?

She didn't know.

Either way, she would find out. The soulmate link stretched between them, guiding her to him. She left the town behind, a glittering cluster of light and noise, left all that was civil and safe behind.

At last she saw him, waiting for her beside the woods. The moonlight cast him in silver and black, all dark eyes and a gleaming smile that grew when he saw her.

"You came," Alex said, and he sounded hesitant, as if he thought she'd turn and run.

Lisa swallowed. The fear was back, fluttering under her skin. "I promised I would."

"I know. I know, but..." He let out his breath. "I wasn't sure."

"Neither am I."

He watched her, head tilted to one side. He said, quietly, "Do you remember the woods near Ratae? They weren't so different to these."

Fairytale woods, tangled and ancient and secretive. Alex had vanished into them now again, to hunt, he'd said. She knew he was werewolf by then, but had never seen him change. He was oddly silent about it.

_She'd followed him into them one night, a human girl wanting to understand an inhuman world. It had been a strange place, broken into pieces – blades of moonlight lancing through the darkness, the sudden whispers of leaves tossed on the wind, hard ground and gnarled trees. _

_She became lost, stumbling on the treacherous roots, grazing her hands on the pebbles. It was close and cold, a skyless, lightless monstrous place. And then she staggered through a thicket – and there, in front of her, was a wolf, teeth bared, hackles raised._

_Lisa froze. And for a wild moment, she expected it to attack. And then she looked into its eyes, and felt the shock of recognition, and of connection._

_And Alex ran._

_There was no thought in her head – she ran after him. He was faster, surer, and no matter how desperate she was, it was no match for his speed. She called his name: she waded through nettles and briars, not understanding why he'd fled._

_She fell, and it was one time too many, and her confusion and hurt and fear boiled into tears. She sat on the cold ground and cried as if her heart would break because Alex had run, because she was too human, too slow, too ordinary for his world._

_And then arms crept around her, very hesitant, but warm. _

_She looked up, astonished, into those very familiar eyes, and realised that it was Alex, breathing hard._

"_You hate me," she said, her voice husky. "I saw it."_

"_Not you," he muttered. "Me. You weren't supposed to see." He looked unlike himself – dishevelled, wild, shorn of civility and his clever words. His laugh was tired. "It's not very civilised, is it?"_

_She said, slowly, "Does that matter?"_

_He looked at her, his mouth soft and vulnerable. "I thought it would to you."_

_When she kissed him, he shivered and his arms tightened around her. And it turned out that even if he wasn't entirely human, right then, under the feathery shadows, he was human enough._

"I remember," she said. "I'm not likely to forget, am I?"

And she didn't mean to do it, but her fingers touched her stomach. And she saw the flash of grief in his face, but it was mingled with anger too, and that she didn't understand.

Alex said, very quietly, "I'm sorry."

Lisa turned away. She almost never thought about it now, and when she did, there was no blame to be had. "It wasn't your fault. You couldn't have done anything."

She didn't see him flinch.

"Was that why you did it?" she said, and the question spilled out. She had never asked, never felt the need to, but she felt precarious and dizzy and unsure, the past too close and the present too uncertain. "Was that why you slept with Guinevere?"

There was silence, pure and deep, and then Alex said in a voice like thunder, "Why I did _what?_"

_And suddenly I fall through the cracks in time  
And I'm standing here with your hand in mine  
And I turn around to see you;  
There's no one there._

oOo

I would absolutely love to hear what you think...


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